UK Covid inquiry, AI, and cat contraception
As the UK's Covid inquiry kicks off, will it help to transform how we tackle future pandemics? How an AI is writing its own computer code, speeding up the Internet; and using gene therapy for cat contraception.
In this episode
00:50 - UK Covid inquiry kicks off
UK Covid inquiry kicks off
Emma Norris, Institute for Government
最重要的一个公共调查英国人ish history is getting underway in a bid to determine what ministers got right and wrong - before, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Emma Norris is the deputy director at the Institute for Government - which is an independent think-tank that has been calling for a Covid-19 inquiry.
艾玛,所以Covid调查是一个公开调查,kind of investigation, that is looking at what happened during the pandemic in a whole range of ways, and how prepared we were for the pandemic. How good was the decision making that governments took? How did the health and care service respond? And how did the pandemic affect different people, young people, for instance. So the purpose of the inquiry is to look at some of those different questions and try and work out what happened, why did it happen, and perhaps most importantly, how can we stop this happening again? Or at least ensure that we are as prepared as we can be for any future pandemic or similar incident.
Chris - Why do organisations, yourselves included, think we need this? Is the learning not sufficiently obvious already?
Emma - The experience of the pandemic is really unusual in that it has affected almost everybody in society, almost all institutions across government and the public sector. And indeed, lots of the private sector were involved in some way. And so really you need to create an institution, an organisation, a body that's capable of looking right across what occurred and asking, how can we do better? Now, it might be, and I would expect that, the inquiry will find that there are some things that we did really well and it's worth capturing that, but it's inevitable that they will find some things that didn't work so well and that government and other people need to take into account and learn from so we can do better next time. It's really normal to undertake a public inquiry when there's been some form of tragedy, scandal or just a very serious incident. I think something like the pandemic clearly meets that standard for when you need a proper, independent institution that can look at what happened and learn.
Chris - Are other countries doing something similar?
Emma - Lots of other countries are doing something similar, although not in exactly the same way all across Europe. For instance, there are inquiries taking place trying to learn from the experience of responding to the pandemic. We've gone for something called a statutory public inquiry. So it has legal powers, it's very wide ranging, it will last quite a long time. The public hearings won't finish until 2026, some other countries have gone for slightly different models. So, for instance, Sweden went for something much faster, all focused on speed learning quickly. We are doing something much more wide ranging, but most countries want to do something that helps them just reflect on what happened during the pandemic.
Chris - Isn't speed of the essence here? Are we potentially trading a big spend for more knowledge that might be out of date? I'm a bit cynical about other reports and inquiries we've had historically about other sorts of major events. We are worried about the next pandemic, which could occur at any time. Is it not really important that we get this quick?
Emma - You've just touched, Chris, on one of the key arguments that sits at the heart of how you go about doing these kinds of investigations. Do you go for something really broad that tries to capture as much as you possibly can, but inevitably that means it's going to be a really long process? Or do you go for something really tight in the way that Sweden has - only consider a few core issues and report quickly? I can see both sides of the argument. I would say that the Covid inquiry has tried to structure itself in a way that to some extent gives you the best of both worlds. So it's not just one big inquiry, it's broken itself up into different modules. The one that's already started and the public hearing start for next week is all about how prepared we were, how ready were we for a pandemic. The next module that's starting later this year is looking at government, central government decision making. Then we've got future modules on the health sector and the care sector. Now, after each of those modules, they will publish an interim report with a set of recommendations. So we are not going to be waiting until 2026 or 2027 to hear what the Covid inquiry thinks about what should change. We'll probably find out quite early next year, I think, what their recommendations are on how we can be better prepared and probably at a later point next year on what the lessons are for central government decision making. So they'll be more a drip feed of recommendations, if you like, over the next four or five years. But you are right that one of the dangers is that, by the time it reports, everything will have changed. The public sector is changing. It's learning all the time. And so something that the inquiry will need to do is stay on top of not just what was the government like when the pandemic happened, but what is it like when the inquiry reports and how does it make sure it's recommendations reflect the reality of government rather than just looking backwards.
Chris - Who are they going to talk to?
艾玛-一个非常广泛的人。的那种people you'd expect to be called to provide written statements or give witness statements at hearings. Medical professionals, epidemiologists, but economists as well, policy makers. You'd also expect to hear from decision makers. So officials, civil servants for instance, but also politicians. And we know that for this first module for which public hearings are starting next week, we're likely to hear from the former Prime Minister David Cameron and probably the former Chancellor George Osborne, partly to understand how much they prepared for a possible pandemic. The inquiry also wants to dig into how some of their decisions, their policies during their time in government, how they affected how prepared we were looking at things like austerity. So it's a really wide range of officials, politicians and experts that we would expect to see called up to the inquiry.
Chris - So why are they after Boris Johnson's WhatsApp?
Emma - The Covid inquiry is interested in all forms of evidence on what the government was thinking, what it was doing, what it was talking about when it was making decisions about the pandemic. And they say that as part of that they want access to private diaries, notebooks and the WhatsApps of Boris Johnson, but I'm sure they're going to ask for similar material from other politicians and officials. Now, the cabinet office, part of the centre of government in the UK, is saying, "no, you're going too far. That material's private." And where it is, as they say, kind of irrelevant to the inquiry, they don't want them to have access to it. The inquiry is saying it's up to them to decide what's relevant, not up to the government. So there's this wrangle going on at the moment that's really about who gets to decide what is relevant to the Covid inquiry.
07:46 - AI writes code that runs 70% faster than ours
AI writes code that runs 70% faster than ours
Daniel Mankowitz, DeepMind
It has been revealed that AlphaDev - an artificial intelligence agent from DeepMind - has been able to discover new and improved computer sorting algorithms widely used in common computer programming languages. Essentially it’s writing new computer code from scratch, which runs up to 70% faster than the manmade counterpart. The man behind the breakthrough is Deepmind’s Daniel Mankowitz…
Daniel - We live in this increasingly digital society and with Moore's law coming to an end and chips starting to reach their fundamental physical limits, we need to find new and innovative ways of optimising the computing stack because there is this increasing demand in energy usage. And this got us to think, well, can we go and optimise some of the fundamental algorithms that are called trillions of times every day by applications and companies all around the world?
Chris - I suppose it's a bit like historically when we wanted to make a car go faster, we just slammed a bigger engine in it and now we find ourselves constrained by the fact that fuel is getting expensive. That's like the electricity. So we're in a situation now where we are making the engines we have got better and therefore they can be smaller and more efficient, but we get the same performance from them. You are saying with software we've been able to rely on the fact that processes just kept getting juicier and could do more, so we didn't have to worry about how well we wrote the software, but now we do.
Daniel - Yeah, absolutely. Everything kind of needs to be streamlined if we want to really generate sort of the maximum performance. And you can think of the car as also analogous to the computing stack where there are different parts of the computing stack that we can optimise. There are different parts of the car that we can streamline.
Chris - In the old days, I call it the old days, but before you came along, what did we do to optimise software we'd written?
Daniel - Yeah, so a lot of the things and advancements that have been done has been from humans looking at these programs and figuring out how to improve them. And then it sort of moved to the next stage of can we start to find ways to automate this way of discovering improved algorithms? And so approaches started to come out that would try to actually search the program itself and to try and figure out 'if I change this in the program or that in the program, what happens?' What we have with our approach AlphaDev is the ability to go and search starting from scratch. So in other words imagine you're building an engine from scratch. We want to build an algorithm from scratch. We tell it, we want the algorithm that you build to be correct and as fast as possible. And then AlphaDev goes and searches through the space automatically to build an algorithm that does that.
Chris - When people talk about AI, they talk about training it with a data set. Usually information that we've already generated, but it ends up being constrained by the fact that there are limits to what we know and therefore there are certain limits to what it knows. So can you transcend those boundaries with what you've done then? Because you are just saying to this thing, 'this is what I want you to achieve, just go and explore.'
Daniel - Yeah. There is that capability now with this type of technology and this was something that has sort of been built on from previous technologies coming out of DeepMind. So there was the famous system AlphaGo that beat the world champion at the game of go in this game. It did what's called the famous move from number 37. All the experts looked at this move and said, 'no, this is a mistake. Why is it doing that? This is not the right thing to do.' And it turned out that that actually was the right thing to do. But not only that, it was so impactful that it started to influence the strategies in the game of go and how people taught it and really transcended something that humans had assumed was impossible. Similarly with AlphaDev, what we found is that when saying to it, ‘go and build an algorithm and figure out how to search the space so that you end up finding something that's faster than what exists,’ it also discovered these types of moves that when you look at the algorithm, you might not expect that you could do these types of moves to make the algorithm more efficient.
Chris - To be clear then this thing is essentially writing its own computer code.
Daniel - Correct, yeah.
Chris - So you basically say the aim of the game is I want to do this lap of the circuit in the fastest time possible. That's your goal. And how will you choose to run around the circuit? Whether you take the hurdles or you cut right across the middle or something and cheat, that's up to you. But the aim is to get the shortest possible time and then just let it get on with it.
Daniel - Yeah. That's exactly it. And so we devised the game and you define what it means to win the game and in the case of building an algorithm, it's making the algorithm correct and fast. And in terms of the circuit, it's about, as you say, the game is to move around the lap and winning it is doing the lap in the shortest amount of time.
Chris - When you look at what it produced compared to what we had produced, how much better was it
Daniel - When we started testing it, we found that there were performance improvements all the way from 2% up to 70% sorting items faster.
Chris - Good grief. 70%, some of them. That's incredible. Does this mean, well, I suppose the obvious question is why stop here? Can you deploy this at other common computer problems that can be optimised and tweaked and potentially cut the carbon footprint of computing? Some say the internet has a carbon footprint equivalent to the airline industry. Does this mean we could make significant inroads all over the place with this?
丹尼尔-这是我们希望的。我们实际上did take it a step further. We identified an algorithm called hashing. If you imagine in a library you have a librarian and you call a sorting function. Sorting could be used to, for example, sort the books from A to Z. Hashing is more about finding a book. The idea is that for each book you give it a special unique number, which we would call a hash. And what that means is that when a librarian goes to find a particular book, they know that they're looking for a particular number corresponding to that book, which is the hash. And so instead of having to go and search through the entire library of books, they know exactly where to go. And so we applied AlphaDev to improve a hashing algorithm and we managed to find an improved algorithm that's was 30% faster. And it's now available to developers, companies, and users around the world.
15:04 - Gene therapy could control cat population
Gene therapy could control cat population
David Pepin, Harvard University & Bill Swanson, Cincinnati Zoo
Eighty percent of the world’s 600 million domestic cats are strays and subject to poor living conditions, and they pose a threat to other wildlife. Female cats have traditionally been spayed in a bid to control the size of the population. But could an injected gene therapy shot in which a virus is used to deliver a hormone that stops the ovary from producing eggs be a much more effective alternative. I’ve been speaking to researchers David Pepin and, kicking off, Bill Swanson...
Bill - We have a problem with overpopulation of both dogs and cats in the world. And for cats, we estimate that there's more than 600 million of them and 80% of those animals, they're free living animals, so they tend to have pretty short lives. And there's a huge animal welfare issue with those animals getting diseases and being hit by automobiles. From a conservation perspective, they kill a lot of wild birds and wild prey. They have major impacts on wildlife populations. The primary way that we address that now is through surgical sterilisation, and that requires the intervention of veterinarians. It requires surgical facilities and it's very expensive and labour intensive. So the goal here was to come up with a method of sterilising cats that did not require surgery.
Chris - And your coworker, David, has been part of this as well. What was the approach you've taken, David?
David - So my laboratory has been interested in studying this female reproductive hormone called anti mullerian hormone or AMH. And one of the discoveries we've made is, if you raise the levels of this hormone, you can produce contraception. And so we developed a number of tools including a gene therapy approach that we had initially studied in mice and rats. And we thought this may be a tool that could work to control the cat population. And so we started working with Bill to try to apply these findings to the cat.
Chris - How does the technique work? What does this anti mullerian hormone do? Why does it work as a contraceptive? And why was the leap between rodents then into cats? Normally cats chase mice, but this is the other way around?
David - Anti mullerian hormone is actually a natural hormone produced by the ovary and it's normal function is to regulate the development of follicles in the ovary. And by raising the levels of this hormone, we can suppress the growth of follicles in the maturation stage. And if we raise it high enough, we can actually more or less stop follicles from developing in the rodents. And so now we try to apply this to cats and to do so we developed a gene therapy approach, which is basically using a virus to deliver the gene, encoding AMH, and then the virus infects muscle cells and those muscle cells will then produce the protein secreted into the blood and raise that level in circulation up to the contraceptive threshold.
Chris - And did you get high levels of this produced for a long time? Because obviously the goal of contraception is it's got to work for a long time, otherwise eventually you'll be back to square one.
David - Right, and that's the beauty of gene therapy is that you can, in one injection, transduce cells and coax them into producing this hormone for a very long time. In our case, we're still following these cats four years in and they're still expressing their hormone.
Chris - So it sounds like it's working, Bill.
Bill - Yeah, the paper describes the results from our main study, which involved nine cats. And so we treated six of those cats with the gene therapy that delivered the AMH gene to produce that protein. And then we had three control cats in that study, and we found that they did produce very high AMH levels and it did have some impact on fertility.
Chris - In what way? What was the outcome?
Bill - Well, the main outcome was that the cats were not ovulating. And obviously if you don't ovulate, you can't have an egg to be fertilized. And then the cats are contraceptive for as long as that protein is elevated.
Chris - And David, did this play out the way you had anticipated in the cats? When you look at the expression from your gene therapy of the signal that you're putting in the AMH, does this continue to be expressed the way you had hoped? Were there any side effects? Were the cats otherwise well?
大卫-在老鼠身上我们可以达到非常高的水平,nd that obviously could last the lifetime of a mouse, but the lifetime of a mouse is very short. It's about a year or two. In cats we need to get production for much longer than this. But in the way it was given, which is intramuscularly, and then, following the concentration in the blood, it was very similar between the two species. In both cases, the injection was well tolerated. There was no adverse events. We saw no signs of toxicity. And so we were very encouraged by the safety of the approach.
Chris - And one always wonders when you've got people building gene therapy vectors with viruses, about environmental safety (is there any risks that the cats could then transmit this to other vulnerable cats species we want to preserve and conserve in the world and render them infertile by accident) but also, does it have any other knock on effects for the physiology of the cat? Are they otherwise okay?
David - So that's a very important point. The virus that we use is an Adeno-associated virus, which is non replicative, which means that, following infection, no new particles are made, it doesn't make any new virus. So it can't spread from cat to cat or even to the wild to other species. Also, the genome that's delivered by this virus doesn't integrate. That means it never gets into the DNA of the cat. So there are some inherent safety mechanisms based on the virus that we use.
Chris - And Bill, does this mean then that the next step is to try this and do this on a broad scale, not just in domestic animals in a very constrained circumstance, but test this on real feral animals and see if you are able to achieve long-term suppression of fertility?
比尔-是的,是我们的主要资金来源the Michelson Found Animal Foundation, and they're meeting with the Food and Drug Administration this month to really talk about the path forward to get this approved as a veterinary product. And that's going to require a lot more data. So we're going to have to do probably larger studies involving more cats to verify the safety and efficacy that we saw in our study.
21:44 - The return of an 'extinct' UK butterfly
The return of an 'extinct' UK butterfly
Frank Gardener, BBC
The BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner, is well-known here in the UK for covering topics of huge global significance. But we’ve invited him onto the programme to tell us about his other passion - which is documenting wildlife. And he was part of a group that found something remarkable.
Frank - Yeah, this is pretty exciting actually. Along with a small number of other nature enthusiasts, specifically butterfly enthusiasts, we have seen the first wild living examples of a black veined white butterfly flying around in Britain since it was thought to be extinct in Britain in 1925, or to be used, the exact word, extirpated. They were first seen in Britain, or first registered in Britain, in 1667 in King Charles II. They disappeared from the British in 1925. They're quite common on the continent, but they disappeared from southeast England. That was their last stronghold. And then some friends of mine reported that they had seen them in southeast London about two weeks ago. And I thought this was pretty interesting. I was working all week in Ukraine, but as soon as I got a chance of the weekend, I went down, joined up with them, and they very generously gave their time to help me find them and photographed them. And I took those photographs, and they kind of went viral. Actually, it was extraordinary. I put one on Twitter on my Twitter account, which is Frank R. Gardner, and it got 470,000 views, nearly half a million views. I know I sound like a teenager, but it just shows the interest and popularity in these things. It's a very beautiful insect. I mean, if you imagine the kind of your bog standard boring communal garden white butterfly that flutters around and you know, is frankly a bit of a nuisance, nibbling away at things. It's like that, but perhaps nearly twice as large with these very lovely, delicate black veins running through it. And they like hawthorn trees and blackthorn, and there is a chance that they could actually reestablish themselves. So amidst all the really grim climate related environmental news about so many species disappearing in all parts of the animal kingdom, it's great to get a once a rare bit of good news here.
Chris - Was it the loss of hedgerows, which is what happened wholesale in the time window that you referred to their disappearance? Was it that in the southeast of England that led to their disappearance? Was it loss of environment and is it the fact that we have had some change of regulation, we have had incentivisation of farmers to concentrate on what's around the edges of their fields and replant hedges and so on. Is it that that's bringing them back?
弗兰克-山楂,黑刺李和栖息地they need to have these undisturbed and yes, those habitats have shrunk. Believe it or not, Winston Churchill tried to reintroduce them along with the swallowtail. They were his favorite butterflies. And he actually got some caterpillars and got them reintroduced to his garden in Chartwell in Kent. But his gardener saw these nests in the hawthorn trees and cut them down. So that didn't go well. But I think the reason, I mean, it's a bit of a mystery why and how they have appeared. Butterfly conservation, the charity which monitors butterfly numbers in the UK, was very quick to say although it's lovely for people to see them, let's not get carried away, it's very unlikely that they're going to reestablish themselves here subsequently. It now looks as if rather than it being a casual and unofficial reintroduction by somebody, you know, rather irresponsibly chucking caterpillars around the place instead. Local experts are telling me they think that it was from a female that came across the continent last year. They're quite common on the continent, as I say, and laid eggs. And these have hatched, and it's a brood quite possibly from last year which makes me think they're in decent enough numbers. We could even see them next summer, in which case they'll reestablish themselves.
26:01 - Can we compress gas into a solid?
Can we compress gas into a solid?
James - This is an interesting question. What it’s getting at is whether we can bypass the middle step matter usually takes when being converted from a gas to a solid. That middle step is, of course, the liquid phase.
Usually, when the temperature of a gas is reduced to the point where its molecules or atoms come together, they form a liquid. This is known as condensation. Similarly, when we reduce the temperature of a liquid to the point where its molecules and atoms come even closer together, they form a solid. This is freezing.
We do observe this bypassing of the middleman in the case of gaseous water vapour crystallising into ice - or frost - and this process is called deposition. But your question, Akula, specifies whether we can physically compress a gas into a solid, ignoring temperature as a factor. I’m going to need some help to get to the bottom of that one. Luckily, I’ve recruited science communicator and friend of the show, Dave Ansell, to help me provide an answer…
The short answer, Akula, is yes, but your material may not be the same when you reduce the pressure after compression. On a small scale a solid is just a load of atoms or molecules sticking together. If you compress a gas very quickly, applying a lot of pressure, there will always be some atoms leaving into the gas and some sticking back on. The higher the temperature, the more atoms will leave every second, and the higher the pressure the more will join. So when you increase the pressure more atoms will join than leave and you will build a solid, though there will always be some atoms left behind in the gas phase.
It gets a bit more complicated if you are at a pressure and temperature that a liquid can exist, but with most liquids if you squash them they will eventually freeze. Even water ice which can melt when you squash it, has some phases of ice that are denser than water that form under extreme pressures of over 10 000 atmospheres so it will work eventually.
Another complicating factor is that if you compress a gas or most liquids they will get hotter, which makes it harder to form a solid, but if you push hard enough they will eventually solidify.
So if you squash hard enough pretty much anything will form a solid but with a lot of materials if you apply these kind of temperatures and pressures to them they may well be altered chemically so they may not come out the same as they started.
So Akula, yes indeed a gas can transition into a solid without first becoming a liquid, although this is rare. Manufacturing to conditions under which we could compress gas into a solid is even more difficult, but could be possible. Thanks for sending that in.
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