I, Science Issue 42 (Spring 2019)

I,SCIENCE The Science magazine of Imperial College

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I, SCIENCE TEAM EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Jacqueline Darkwa Aoife Hardesty MAGAZINE EDITOR Christine Parry PICTURES EDITOR Céleste Nilges WEB EDITOR Rachel Ng NEWS EDITOR Madeleine Openshaw ONLINE FEATURES EDITOR Juan Rubio RADIO EDITOR Hilary Guite RADIO PRODUCER Jason Hosken TV EDITOR Jemma Titheridge

I, Science is a publication of the Science Communication Unit, Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication, Imperial College London. However, it is a student-run publication, and as such the views expressed in I, Science do not reflect the views of the Unit, Centre or College.

Front Cover: Jemma Titheridge

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TV EDITOR Jemma Titheridge MARKETING MANAGER Jialu Wang SOCIAL MEDIA OFFICER Rebecca Bloomfield EVENTS MANAGER Andrew Dixon SUB-EDITORS Katrina Brain Gina Degtyareva Kathy Grenville Ruby Pickup Sadie Sweetland May Vilailuck

Contents 16 The Story of James 4

Editorial

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News

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Is Bad Science all that Bad?

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The Myth of Personal Genomics

Watson, Racial Purity and Milk

18 Are Scientists

Contributing to the Plastics Problem?

AI, Captain! A New

20 Scientific Voyage

22 Science: The War on Conscience

23 Cultures on Display 10 Why STEM

needs its #MeToo moment

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Blocking the Path to Acceptance

24 Xenotransplantation:

Flying too close to the sun?

26 Bull in a China shop

14 Getting off Lightly

28 In Defence of Bad Science

30 The Science of Astrology?

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Dear Reader, Thank you for picking up the spring issue of I, Science. We might be biased, but we think you’re going to really enjoy this issue.

So, what is Bad Science and why dedicate an entire issue to it? Bad science means a lot of very different things to all of us, but as you will uncover as you explore these pages, bad science can exist both inside and outside the laboratory. Bad science is everything from scientists miscommunicating their research to science that has been misused and abused. By the end of this issue we want you to think differently about science. There is no question we all owe a lot to the advancements of science- none more so than the current cohort of science communicators here at Imperial! - but science must also be held accountable when necessary. We want to muddle your brain and expand on what you may have previously considered bad science. So, we invite you to leave all preconceived perceptions right here and enjoy our Bad Science issue.

Jacqueline and Aoife We are always on the lookout for new contributors for both the magazine and online.

If you would like to get involved as a writer, an illustrator, or a photographer, please get in touch with us.

Email us at i.science@imperial.ac.uk Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @isciencemediea Contact us via our website: www.isciencemag.co.uk Interested in advertising with to a dedicated readership?

Please contact iscience-business@imperial.ac.uk

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On the 15th February, thousands of children across the UK took time out of their education to protest the government’s lack of action on climate change. These pupils, many of whom are too young to vote, were joined by supportive adults as they demanded protection for their future. With potentially just twelve years left for the global population to change the fate of the world, children in Europe are marching every week, adding their voices to the global call to keep warming below two degrees Celsius. By Julia Langer

We are sad to report that the Bramble Cay melomys, a small brown rat species found on an island off northern Australia, has become the world’s first mammal to go extinct as a result of human-induced climate change. Unfortunately, conservation efforts have failed and there have been no sightings for nearly ten years. The key cause of the mammal’s extinction is thought to have been due to ocean inundation, resulting from rising sea levels, leading to a dramatic loss of habitat. If temperatures continue to rise at the rate they are, we’re likely to lose almost 8% of species worldwide, with those in Australia and New Zealand being at greatest risk.

By Nur Pirbhai

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W S E ‘My battery is low and it’s getting dark’

It could be the genesis of a new era of space exploration after the launch of the first privately funded mission to the moon.

In early April, the beresheet lander should touch down in the sea of serenity where it will take photos and measure the magnetic field on the lunar surface. News of the launch broke just 24 hours after the Japanese probe, Hayabusa 2, landed successfully on the surface of asteroid Ryugu where it will take samples, release a rover and hopefully return home safely at the end of the year. By Harry Lampert

An advisory committee to the US Food and Drug Administration has strongly endorsed esketamine, a derivative of the drug ketamine, for use in treatment-resistant depression.

Ketamine is licensed for use by doctors as a pain killer and sedative, although it is also known for its illicit popularity as a party drug. This latest recommendation makes it likely that the FDA will approve esketamine for marketing in the US, making it the first new drug treatment for depression to be released in decades. By Madeleine Openshaw

In a story that has touched many hearts around the world, a 15-year space mission to Mars has finally come to an end. On the 13th February, NASA announced that it had given up attempts to re-establish contact with the red planet’s rover called ‘Opportunity’ after it fell silent following a dust storm. Its last words - ‘My battery is low and it’s getting dark’ - were shared all around the world, although that is more of a poetic interpretation of the rover’s last transmission in 2018. It’s fair to say that the rover had a great life and far exceeded its life expectancy - after all, it was only meant to last 90 days on the red planet! By Gina Degtyareva

Image (top right): Garry Knight

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Is ‘Bad Science’ all THAT Bad? Do the Ig Nobel awards reward bad science?

Juan Rubio Gorrochategui examines these unconventional awards.

considered the career pinnacle of every ‘good’ scientist). In fact, there has been an instance of a Nobel Prize winner being awarded with an Ig Nobel as well; Sir André Geim, who won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for magnetically levitating small frogs, was awarded the Nobel Prize ten years later for his research on graphene.

While it is true that in some cases the Ig Nobels have chosen to ironically elevate pseudoscientific research in order to mock it for the bogus it is (Erik von Däniken

won the Literature category in 1991 for proposing, without meaningful basis, the theory that ancient civilisations were under the influence of extraterrestrials), prizes normally go to talented researchers that happen to do a study on a very eccentric part of the reality. The philosophy of the Ig Nobels can be illustrated by enumerating this year’s winners, and the research they received their award for.

As these demonstrate, the studies deemed worthy of an Ig Nobel Prize have either a bizarre subject, the uncommon applications of a ‘normal’ thing, or strange phenomena and practices.

All of the studies were relatively benign, and the scientists awarded with the prizes did not feel insulted by the honour seeing as many of them took the time to attend the ceremony.

It was a celebration of the most mundane aspects of

science, of the goofiness and weirdness that characterises many laymen and that sometimes is seen as far removed from the formal character of professional research. While not as prestigious, important or transcendental as the Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel Prizes reward some of the best qualities of human character.

And that is something we can all agree is a good thing.

Too many times we use the

frivolity, but that in retrospect turned out to be a fascinating simplistic classifications of ‘bad science’ or ‘good science’. way of looking into the basics of the scientific method and We tend to use ‘bad science’ to refer to disproven scientific the question of what science is itself. In a handful of cases, theories such as eugenics, this banal streak of science or to practices with no basis has ended up providing in the scientific method like important discoveries with astrology. potential applications to But sometimes the distinction change millions of lives for the better. To acknowledge the between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ work of this hidden side of science is not as clear cut as research, the Ig Nobel Prizes that and there are types of were constituted in 1991. science that transcend the dichotomy. These include The Ig Nobels are not the examples of science that may look ‘bad’ at first glance evil twin of the Nobel Prize (which have always been due to their weirdness and

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IG NOBEL WINNERS 2018: Anthropology: Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc and Elainie Madsen, for “collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees.”

Biology: Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Erika Wallin, Erik Hedenstrom, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Marie Bengtsson, Volker Jorger and Peter Witzgall, for “demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence of a single fly in a glass of wine.”

Chemistry: Paula Romão, Adília Alarcão and César Viana, for “measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces.”

Economics: Lindie Hanyu Liang, Douglas Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, Lance Ferris and Lisa Keeping, for “investigating whether it is effective for employees to use Voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses.”

Literature: Thea Blackler, Rafael Gomez, Vesna Popovic and M. Helen Thompson, for “documenting that most people who use complicated products do not read the instruction manual.”

Medical Education: Akira Horiuchi, for “the medical report Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned from SelfColonoscopy.”

Medicine: Marc Mitchell and David Wartinger, for “using roller coaster rides to try to hasten the passage of kidney stones.”

Nutrition: James Cole, for “calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat diets.”

Peace: Francisco Alonso, Cristina Esteban, Andrea Serge, Maria-Luisa Ballestar, Jaime Sanmartín, Constanza Calatayud and Beatriz Alamar, for “measuring the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile.”

Reproductive Health: John Barry, Bruce Blank and Michel Boileau, for “using postage stamps to test whether the male sexual organ is functioning properly—as described in their study Nocturnal Penile Tumescence Monitoring with Stamps.”

Image: Rachel Ng

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THE MYTH OF PERSONAL GENOMICS Can personal DNA testing tell us who we are? Naomi Clements-Brod debunks the myth of personal genomics.

In 2018, 23andMe partnered with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in a £300 million project to mine their customers’ genetic data.

In a world where migration, immigration, race and ethnicity are increasingly tense political topics, how does genetic testing for ancestry fit in to the way people think about who they are?

Belonging is a basic human need, and one that was greatly advantageous throughout our evolutionary history. As a result of this evolutionary pressure, humans have a tendency to view ourselves, and others, as having personal and social identities. We display these identities by using symbols like distinctive styles of clothing or hair, and through complex behaviours such as rituals. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors used clues like this to identify who was part of their own group and who was not, i.e. who might help and who might attack.

Elizabeth Hirschman, Professor of Marketing at University of Virginia’s College at Wise, says human ‘branding’ can go beyond manipulation of appearances and include oral symbols, such as the stories we tell about ourselves, our families and where we come from.

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With the widespread availability of cheap genetic sequencing tools, personal genomics companies, such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com, capitalise on our need to belong by promising to provide customers with ‘ethnicity estimates’ or regional ‘ancestral origins’ mapping. These supposedly tell their customers where their ancestors lived, what ‘haplogroup’ they belong to, or along what path their ancestors migrated.

For the uninitiated, ‘haplogroup’ refers to a group of people sharing a specific common ancestor who may have lived thousands of years ago.

Many personal genomics companies pander to curious consumers. Some of these services even allow users to connect through online profiles with living ‘family’ who are usually very distant cousins. And apparently, the promise of being able to strengthen a connection with a community, even a temporally and spatially remote one, is very attractive to many people.

According to the MIT Technology Review in February 2018, more than ten million people across the world had access to their genetic data.

By 2019, that number is likely to be much higher.

That’s a lot of As, Cs, Ts and Gs! The ancestral profiling these companies offer is often based on tiny, sometimes single-letter, differences

in genetic code. While this may seem like very precise science, the actual results can be generic and confusing. Ancestry.com gives customers a list of regions with percentages next to a colour-coded map which, for someone in England, might read something like ‘Europe West – 52%, Ireland and Scotland – 26%, Scandinavia – 8%, Europe South <1%’ and so on. How then should a customer interpret the ‘8% Scandinavia’ result, for example?

Does this mean they’re part Viking?

Customers receive a list of FAQs, a colour-coded map, and a list of regions and percentages but they don’t get much guidance on how to interpret their results. Often, they are left unsure of how to make this data fit with what they already know about themselves and their family history, even when it does roughly match what they already knew. Eager to find meaning and belonging, consumers sometimes end up doing considerable research in order to understand the results.

To demonstrate this confusion, researchers from the universities of Loughborough and Leicester conducted a study with a Yorkshire community that has strong cultural narratives about their claimed Viking heritage. The participants found that the genetic ancestry

information often raised more questions than it answered as they struggled to understand how to interpret their data.

Most of the participants just tended to assimilate their results into what they already believed to be true about their ancestry, while discounting anything that didn’t make immediate sense.

Any customers who are initially disappointed with their results may be relieved to know that as these companies gather more data, they can continually update their ancestry estimates as more small, distinctive genetic differences are catalogued. This means that ancestry estimates can be changed without warning, and seemingly interesting regions could suddenly disappear when according to Ancestry.com, “new data indicates that region does not belong in your results.” What then should a consumer do with all of their recently accumulated Viking paraphernalia?

College London, ancestry information is usually based on group patterns and probabilities, rather than individual differences. Therefore, interpreting genetic ancestry data for individuals is often highly subjective and could be compared to reading horoscopes; for any set of individual results, the same things could also be truthfully said about many people.

Adam Rutherford argues in a 2018 Guardian article that, not only are these companies selling what amounts only to genetic horoscopes, they’re also selling their customers’ data for additional profit. In 2018, 23andMe partnered with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in a £300 million project to mine their customers’ genetic data. While this data may be used to develop medications to combat disease and usher in an age of more effective personalised healthcare, the move caught many 23andMe

In 2018, 23andMe partnered with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in a £300 million project to mine their customers’ genetic data.

According to Professor Hirschman, because this sort of genetic ‘branding’ is based on the blueprint of yourself, it can be difficult to adjust your ‘brand’ when your ancestry estimate doesn’t match what you expected or if it changes suddenly.

Although comparing single-letter differences in code seems very precise, the abrupt changes in ancestry estimates are likely symptomatic of the truly murky nature of ancestry estimation. All humans alive today are closely related, we share 99.9% of our DNA with one another, and according to Mark Thomas, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at University

Image: Carol M Highsmith

customers by surprise, highlighting the corporate and commercial nature of what is typically thought to be impartial: Science.

Aside from impartiality, another lofty goal of science is to impose patterns on nature, subverting uniqueness to the whole, discarding individuality as anomaly in order to predict and explain.

Genetic testing companies turn this on its head, promising to use science to highlight your uniqueness. Even if it does this effectively, can science really tell you who you are? It’s up to you to decide.

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Why STEM still needs its # In an honest article Katrina Brain shines a light on the epidemic of sexual harassment in STEM. When I was a first-year undergraduate I was asked on a date by a teaching assistant in one of my chemistry labs. Teaching assistants were responsible for grading lab reports, so I had to consider if it could affect my grades if I said no. Suddenly, what I had previously thought of as professional relationship with someone I saw in the lab turned into something that made me anxious and uncomfortable. Not to mention he seemed completely unaware of how inappropriate his behaviour was. As I know now, this was more than just an isolated incident — it was an early introduction to behaviour that many women working and learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) experience all too regularly.

STEM fields have the highest reported rates of sexual harassment of any workplace outside the military, with the highest rates among women, especially women of colour, and sexual or gender minorities. The statistics are staggering — in one survey of 666 academic field researchers out of the University of Illinois, over 70% of women reported having experienced sexual harassment in the field.

Not only is the frequency with which workers in STEM face sexual harassment alarming, but so too is that fact that our decades-long awareness of the issue hasn’t resulted in much progress towards eliminating it. There are media accounts of professors sexually abusing students as far back as 1980, and academic research from 1995 documents the issue calling it the “single most widespread educational hazard.”

Universities and funders have long had policies in place to deal with harassment, but they’ve historically been weak and poorly implemented. Those found guilty of sexual harassment rarely lose their jobs or research grants. More frequently, either nothing happens, the guilty are put on administrative leave and don’t lose their salaries, or they move to other institutions after being allowed to quietly resign.

Despite how widely understood the issue of sexual harassment already was in academia, when #MeToo took off in Hollywood in Autumn 2017 and instigated change in the entertainment industry, STEM was left behind.

The #MeTooSTEM tag first appeared in late 2017. But it didn’t gain much traction until June 2018, almost a year later, when an American study by the National Academy of Sciences revealed that almost 60% of academic workers had experienced sexual harassment.

The visibility this gave to the issue put pressure on governments, universities, and funding bodies to make policy changes. Science funders like the Wellcome Trust and the US National Science Foundation adopted zero-tolerance policies for sexual harassment in 2018, vowing that they will unequivocally pull funding from guilty researchers or institutions. There have also been some high-profile cases, like the 2017 firing of Dr. David Merchant from Boston University resulting from his abuse towards students while on research trips in Antarctica. The Antarctic glacier named after Merchant has since been renamed.

More recently, Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s National Geographic show, StarTalk, was pulled from the air after allegations by his former assistant were publicised.

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As in the entertainment industry, hierarchical institutional structures in academia and the lack of diversity in positions of power contribute to the prevalence of sexual harassment. Trainees and

moment younger academics depend on references from principal investigators for future jobs as well as collaborations with other scientists in order to get published. In short, relationships with superiors can make or break careers in STEM. Solutions to stop sexual harassment have to be focused on this reality; repercussions can’t leave room for harassers to damage victims’ careers more than they already have.

There is concern that if the most widely proposed solution is implemented, and funding is pulled from the research groups of sexual harassers, the ones who suffer most will be their trainees and younger academics who depend on that funding. This critique intends to protect the most vulnerable young academics and ensure that the right people face repercussions. But at the same time, that sort of mindset also potentially protects abusers from consequences. So, pulling funding clearly isn’t a catch all solution.

Concerns about the unintended consequences of pulling funding gives way to the idea that firm repercussions for sexual harassment will hurt scientific progress. However, the issue is more complex than that as the lack of consequences has already wounded scientific advancements; we cannot quantify the brilliant work that might could been gifted to the world by researchers who changed their jobs or career trajectories due to sexual harassment. When victims are left unable to do their best work or feel forced to leave science altogether, the entire scientific community and the quality of their science suffers alongside the victims. A Nature editorial from 2018 stated that “Improving the participation of underrepresented groups [in science] is not just fairer — it could produce better research.” Therefore, if it is mostly women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and gender minorities that are being harmed and pushed out by sexual harassment, we will lose the diversity of perspectives that good science relies on.

Failure to treat sexual harassment as scientific misconduct also feeds into a dangerous myth that may perpetuate the issue; this myth is that the ‘quirks’ and ‘eccentricities’ of brilliant scientists are somehow part of their ability to produce scientific innovations. But sexually harassing behaviour is not just a ‘quirk,’ it poisons the culture in labs workplaces, and it is inherently at the expense of the victims. In a blog post written for Scientific American, the advocacy group 500 Women Scientists summarised the issue in a perfectly written headline: “Harassers aren’t brilliant jerks—They’re bad scientists—and they cost all of us.”

So what are we left to do? We clearly have yet to implement the right solutions. It has been suggested that deliberately increasing diversity in positions of power will create positive topdown change and start a shift in the culture. But those types of changes are slow moving, so it’s hard to know exactly what their impact might be.

This is why STEM still needs its #MeToo moment. We need it because we need to keep having hard conversations about what reporting assault and its consequences should be, and what STEM workplaces would look if they were free of sexual harassment.

The first media reports of the issue were 39 years ago—we need it so that people in STEM aren’t still suffering from this systemic issue in another 39 years, because science can’t flourish if the people in science are suffering.

For more information, or if you’ve been affected by this piece, please visit: metoostem.com

Image: Rachel Ng

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Blocking the Path to Acceptance Many people believe that by providing a scientific explanation for being transgender, this can help society understand how and why this occurs, and therefore increase acceptance.

What are the aims of science? As a science undergraduate faced with this question, I would have answered that the aim of science is to understand the natural world and to use this knowledge for the benefit of society.

This idealistic answer has one big issue. Science does not aim to be good or bad, only to understand. Whilst science has indisputably provided huge benefits to society for centuries, there are also areas where science has been detrimental or even destructive. One such area that has many issues with ‘bad science’ is in science concerning transgender identity.

For those who are unaware of or confused by the terminology, a transgender (or trans) person is usually defined as someone whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth. In contrast, a person whose gender is the same as the sex they were assigned at birth is a cisgender person, or cis for short.

Despite some improvements in awareness and rights, the transgender community remains one of the most discriminated against communities.

When I asked Rebecca, my sister, what her biggest struggle was with being trans, she simply replied with “acceptance.” Her answer hints at the constant daily battle trans people must undertake just to have their identity recognised as valid. Another friend, George*, felt that the biggest struggle he faced was “NHS gatekeeping…with lack of access to transition due to wait times and funding shortages linked to many other negative aspects of being trans.”

The use of science in arguments that

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aim to invalidate trans identity or deny trans people transition treatments is indisputable and occurs for one simple reason. Science is seen by many as an authority which provides unbiased truth. Appealing to science veils the arguments with a thin layer of objectivity, attempting to conceal the transphobia lying underneath.

Some of these ‘scientific’ arguments have become wearyingly familiar.

One of the oldest arguments against trans identity – that male or female genders are determined purely by genitalia or by the sex chromosomes – conflates two different concepts: sex and gender. While sex does have a biological basis, gender is a social construct – it is impacted by biology but also has very clear social, psychological and behavioural elements. By conflating sex and gender, this argument categorises the phenomena of being transgender as an impossibility and refuses to recognise it as a valid identity. The rigid binaries of only male and female used here also deny validity to individuals who exist outside both the sex and gender binaries.

While sex does have a biological basis, gender is a social construct – it is impacted by biology but also has very clear social, psychological and behavioural elements.

Bad science is also routinely used by opponents of transition surgery to argue that gender dysphoria (the distress that some trans people feel due to the mismatch between their mind and their body) is a mental illness. By classifying gender dysphoria in this way, they argue that this distress should be treated by changing the mind rather than transitioning the body. This science is outdated, a relic

Dani Ellenby investigates how ‘science’ can be used to discriminate against transgender people.

from the time when homosexuality was also classified as a mental illness, but this thinking still acts as a barrier which denies trans people necessary transition treatment.

The transgender community still face a constant battle against a barrage of social science studies that deny them their identity. In August 2018, Littman, a social scientist from Brown University, published a paper in PLOS ONE on “rapid onset gender dysphoria”. This hypothesis claimed that higher rates of gender dysphoria are being observed in teenage girls due to it spreading via friends and social media. The hypothesis also suggested that “rapid onset gender dysphoria” is simply a harmful coping mechanism, similar to drug abuse, drinking alcohol, or self-harm. However, the methodology underlining this research paper was flawed, as it only surveyed parents, rather than the individuals experiencing gender dysphoria and was selectively biased as it only recruited on three anti-trans websites.

The very premise of the paper had no solid evidence and could instead be explained by previous concealment of gender dysphoria due to fears over stigma or discrimination.

The whole idea of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” is reminiscent of previous ideas on homosexuality that proclaimed it to be contagious.

Against such an onslaught of bad science, there is an increasing movement to use science as a means

of understanding and validating transgender identity and transition treatment, fighting fire with fire. By proving transgender identity to be innate and biologically determined, this helps fight the idea of social contagion. Many people believe that by providing a scientific explanation for being transgender, this can help society understand how and why this occurs, and therefore increase acceptance. But the promotion of

transgender identity as something for science to explain has dangerous implications and negative social effects that scientists and science communicators need to be aware of.

For example, a common scientific argument against people claiming that sex and gender are binary and determined by genitalia and sex chromosomes involves using examples of intersex individuals.

Intersex people don’t fit into the binary definitions of gender, which can occur for a number of reasons including extra sex chromosomes, insensitivity to sex hormones, and dysfunctional or missing genes that determine sexual characteristics. The reasoning used is that if sex itself is not binary, then gender isn’t either.

However, the intersex community is itself also marginalised and the use of this community as a tool to validate transgender identity dehumanises them and their own struggles with acceptance.

Furthermore, the search for a biological component to transgender identity, through genetic studies or brain scans, also has the potential to lead to increased medicalisation or result in further barriers in accessing hormonal or surgical transition treatments. Studies looking at occurrence rates of transgender identity in identical twins compared to fraternal twins suggest an underlying genetic basis, but a findable “transgender gene” is unlikely to exist. Trying to uncover the genetics of transgender identity may also just increase the risk that is it viewed as a genetic problem, and therefore something to be prevented. Whilst brain scans have shown that trans female brains are more similar to cis female brains (and vice versa), this medicalisation of transgender brains could potentially lead to more severe gatekeeping for transition surgery.

Overall, many trans people now feel that science cannot easily explain transgender identity, as gender is such a complex social and cultural construct rather than simply biological in nature. Attempts to use science to explain transgender identity have not increased acceptance and have the potential to hinder progress.

So, if science can’t help – what can?

“Advocacy,” says Rebecca. “Working on education and helping people deal with their dysphoria is a much more important issue.”

Image: Aliki Krikidi

*Name has been changed to provide anonymity

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Getting Off Lightly Is Science ignoring the Female Orgasm?

Beautifully and frankly, Nur Pirbhai explores her experience with the elusive female orgasm and the lack of science behind it.

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The female orgasm has puzzled scientists throughout history.

Currently, it plays no part in conception and isn’t even experienced by some women during sex. So, it’s apparently useless for procreation and impossible to fully understand, so why is it such a key part of our sex lives?

Well, some scientists have recently proposed a notion: the orgasm is simply an aspect of our evolutionary history. In some mammals, sex stimulates the release of certain hormones and is an essential trigger for ovulation.

According to research done by an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, this used to be the function of the female orgasm in humans. At some point in human evolution however, the link between the orgasm and the regulation of the menstrual cycle was broken.

Although the orgasm has lost its biological function over time, there’s no way it can be phased out entirely – that’s all thanks to the clitoris, which is where the orgasm originates from in females. The clitoris develops from the same part of the embryo as the penis in males, which means if it were to disappear through evolution, it could indicate towards the potential disappearance of the penis as

well. No penis means no natural way for the male body to release sperm, resulting in humans losing the ability to conceive through natural means. This, in turn, could threaten the survival of our species. The female orgasm may no longer be essential for procreation, but its origins and continued presence are a sign that the species is healthy.

Despite this, however, not all females can achieve orgasm.

According to research published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy last year, 10-40% of women reported difficulty when attempting to achieve orgasm (or a complete inability to do so). There are an array of psychological and biological factors associated with the female orgasm and an imbalance in these factors, or conditions associated with them, can cause women to experience the difficulties reported in the study. Psychological causes include stress and anxiety, as well as issues concerning body image and sexual insecurity.

Certain medications, such as antidepressants like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), or anti-anxiety medicines, can also cause people to experience reduced libido, a reduction in ability to orgasm, or total sexual dysfunction. This is sometimes referred to as post-

SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD).

In addition to this, medical conditions like endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) can reduce chances of climaxing. Simply put, there are a huge range of factors which can impact a woman’s ability to orgasm, even if communication and education surrounding these conditions is not always readily available or clear.

As someone with PCOS, I have always paid close attention to my sexual and reproductive health, and since becoming sexually active I have consistently had trouble achieving orgasm. Talking frankly and honestly about sex is still regarded by some as a sensitive and even embarrassing subject, which means it has been difficult for me to gauge what an orgasm involves. What does it feel like?

How could I make sure I was experiencing one? Will I reach it next time? “You’ll know what it feels like,” people say, but will I? When speaking to friends and trying to get more information, the common answers feel as detailed as they are vague: “a wave of intense pleasure,” “a build-up of pressure followed by an explosion of relief,” “a warm sensation”. To this day, I still can’t match those descriptions to anything I’ve experienced during sex. I’m okay with that, even if it sometimes

feels as though I am missing out on something, but when it comes to understanding and accepting myself, what’s available in terms of research leaves me uncertain.

There is very little available information surrounding what that “something” is, and there remains no clear indication of what steps you can take to experience it. The information can be contradictory too, with some researchers claiming an inability to achieve orgasm to be common, whereas others note it to be abnormal.

So, am I missing out? I don’t think so, but the literature and perceptions make it difficult to work out whether I should be.

They’re described and defined by those who’ve experienced them as something euphoric and ecstatic, and common views of sex imply the orgasm is the sole aim, yet reaching orgasm is not the only way to have pleasurable sex.

This is a conclusion I have had to come to independently. Women can experience satisfactory pleasure through masturbation, foreplay and penetration and, as a consequence, may or may not experience orgasm through these methods. This feels like a reasonable mantra by which to function as a sexual being – you could even argue that making orgasms the central focus of a sexual experience can detract from

the event itself, putting pressure on all involved to reach orgasm themselves whilst ensuring their partner does too.

All of this is not to say that the female orgasm isn’t valuable.

It is. Not only for its physical benefits, including increases in the levels of oxytocin (the ‘love hormone’) associated with orgasm, but for its social ones too, like the way it strengthens bonds between partners in relationships.

There may be gaps and miscommunication in the science and there may be unfortunate misconceptions prevalent in society, but this uncertainty allows a chance for the female orgasm to be redefined for the future.

The matter of understanding the female orgasm is a matter of understanding female sexuality, and female sexuality is diverse and powerful, with the potential to compensate for decades of misinformation. The progress may not be as speedy as required, and misconceptions may be difficult to reverse, but women are starting to influence discourse surrounding their sexuality via avenues they were previously denied access to.

This bodes well for the scientific and social understandings of the female orgasm, and for sex in general as we enter an increasingly changing sexual world.

Image: Jemma Titheridge

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James Dewey Watson is a name you will find in any biology textbook just about anywhere in the world. The contributions the 90-year old Nobel prize-winning geneticist has made to modern science are profound and widely celebrated. Whilst I can acknowledge the accomplishments of Dr Watson, I cannot say he is my ‘hero,’ so I suppose it’s a good thing I don’t want to meet him.

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Over the past two decades Watson’s contributions to things outside of science have found themselves in the headlines. In 2007, the scientist compassionately expressed concern over the “prospect of Africa”, not any specific country in the 30 million km2 continent.

Waston was concerned due to the lack of scientific evidence supporting the belief that their “intelligence is the same ours”.

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Watson added that despite wanting everyone to be equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.” These remarks may have led to his forced retirement from his position at Cold Harbour Springs Laboratory, yet Dr Watson found himself in the headlines once again at the start of the new year. In a new PBS documentary on the scientist, Dr Watson doubled down on his comments on race claiming that “there is a difference on the average between blacks and whites on IQ tests,” attributing this to genetics.

I would hope that you don’t need me to tell you Watson’s comments are not only inflammatory, racist and ignorant but are also unfounded by science. Now is Watson solely responsible for all racism present in science? Of course not, and therein lies the problem. Every time Watson is quoted making racist, sexist, or homophobic comments, the conversation lacks focus on how they go onto embolden bigots and misogynists, giving agency to racists in a time where they really don’t need it.

So, what could Watson, white supremacists and milk possibly have in common expect for being, of course, white? Well, as mentioned above, comments such as James Watson’s go a long way to reaffirm the racist view of people who believe that white heritage is superior to other races. The inconvenient truth is that Watson holds a place in science that means what he says carries more weight than your average geneticist. Perhaps Watson should take several leaves out of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

In their November issue last year, the American Journal of Human Genetics released a statement denouncing the “misuse of genetics to feed racist ideologies” and exposing the asinine concept of ‘racial purity’ as ‘scientifically meaningless’”. The 8000-member strong organisation did

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Jacqueline Darkwa enjoys a large glass of milk while admiring her brown skin, and tells a little story about science and racism not address this issue unprovoked; the statement was released after far-right internet forums were found to be using discredited or distorted genetic concepts to justify white supremacy.

White nationalists, white supremacists and other far-right groups have appropriated the science of genetics to claim racial superiority. To the lay-person the sophisticated graphs and data found in forums might sound like real science, but geneticists are worried that people are being misled and not enough is being done to set the proverbial record straight.

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Okay, so how is milk relevant?

Well, and I write this laughing, according to “Enter the Milk Zone,” an account found on white supremacist forums, a map on the evolutionary trait of digesting lactose is proof that ‘real’ Americans are white. The gene for digesting lactose is known to be more common in white populations, and this genetic pop quiz has resulted in groups of white nationalists chugging gallons of milk to prove their racial purity. The same account finished their hate speech-filled post with a potential 2020 Trump presidential campaign slogan, “If you can’t drink milk, you have to go back to Africa.”

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Whilst it can be very easy to laugh at a group of racist, shirtless white men aggressively chugging milk, complacency only leads to inactivity.

Watson, when asked, says he does not believe himself to be racist which is insulting for a whole host of reasons. We can go back and forth over the semantics of whether we call someone a racist, but the issue I would like to highlight with that declaration is that, racist or not, Watson served as director and president of the Cold Harbour Springs Laboratory for 35 years.

For 35 years a man who had held racist, sexist, homophobic views was in a position of power at a prestigious research centre, in charge of scientists’ careers. For those 35 years no one knows how those views influenced his decision on whom to hire, fire, or award grant funding.

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Scientists must acknowledge the power of their research in the wrong hands.

The American Journal of Human Genetics has made a welcomed effort to ensure their research is not being used to fuel more hate and division and I hope we begin to see more of that, even if I don’t get invited to the next KKK milkshake drive.

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Image top, right: Céleste Nilges

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Are Scientists Contributing to the Plastics Problem?

The ban on plastics straws and the surcharge on plastic bags have put sustainability at the forefront of our minds. Imperial College London itself has been pushing for greener practices.

With the disposable cup levy recently implemented in student cafes, I find myself feeling guilty if I forget my reusable cup at home. As such, I was astonished to discover that Imperial is one of the worst higher education institutions in the UK when it comes to sustainability and environmental policy.

In 2018, Imperial came 141st out of 154 on the People and Planet ethical league table, even scoring zero on the metric on environmental policy, ethical investment, education, and water reduction. While the Greening Imperial call-to-action published last year suggested many waste reduction initiatives, it was surprising to find that in such a research-intensive university, there was a lack of discussion about the environmental impact of scientific research.

Plastic has become a significant source of waste in research. Unfortunately plastic has been integrated into all aspects of day-to-day life in the laboratory. In even the most basic of labs, the sheer volume of disposables, such as pipette tips, labels, and packaging, is often overlooked. In 2014, the University of Exeter Bioscience department generated 267 tonnes of plastic waste and estimated around 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste was

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Rachel Ng investigates the dark side of scientific research: Single use plastics.

produced from all biological, medical, or agricultural research labs in the UK that year. This is the dark side of research, and it is researchers and their institutions’ responsibility to find more sustainable solutions.

The motivation ultimately lies in financial savings.

It isn’t easy to persuade people to change their behaviour given the money that can be saved by using plastics.

Plastic use can easily be justified on the grounds of time and cost efficiency.

It is no secret that research can be a costly endeavour as a significant amount of grants can be disbursed to cover the financial costs of equipment, materials, and manpower. For example, over two-thirds of a researchintensive university’s total energy usage is consumed by laboratory buildings. Having equipment antiseptically wrapped in layer after layer of film and arrive ready for use is incredibly convenient. Plastics are also durable, cheap to manufacture, and chemically stable. When allocating grant money, the productivity and profitability of plastic use are unavoidable factors to consider.

While most lab plastics can in principle be recycled as dry mixed recycling, plastics contaminated with substances other than harmless reagents and water are sorted as hazardous or

clinical waste. These types of waste go through different disposal streams— recovered as energy, incinerated or landfilled. While recycling is, in theory, more environmentallyfriendly than landfill or incineration, it still takes a significant amount of energy, in transport and other resources, to process. Considering the types of research done in labs, much of the plastics that are used will be contaminated, therefore being unsuited to recycling.

Several labs at Imperial College London, along with other researchintensive institutions, are part of a steering group to pilot the new Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) tool. LEAF focuses on multiple areas of sustainability, including plastics, waste, equipment energy use, ventilation, chemicals, and research quality. It allows labs to record and estimate the impact of their actions and aims to help laboratories to bring down costs, reduce environmental impact, and inform users about sustainable practices in the process. Although this initiative is still in its infancy, it is a promising framework for state-wide implementation.

Other initiatives are also taking place.

Speaking to I, Science, members of the Waste and Recycling team discussed Imperial’s plans to organise collections with chemical manufacturers to take back unused supplies of reagents.

This would reduce the amount of

waste the University produces and places the responsibility of finding appropriate paths to reusing and disposing to the manufacturer. The University of Edinburgh has also started an investigation into the efficiency of cold-storage facilities.

As Ultra-Low-Temperature Freezers are particularly energy intensive, this study could inform researchers about energy-saving practices while maintaining sample viability at varying temperatures. Other universities have set up sustainability programs, including swapping to reusable glassware; sharing programs for reagents and consumables; and funding energy-recovering facilities.

The prospects for these programs will depend on the scale, intensiveness, and facilities of institutions.

There is still an incentive hurdle for labs to adopt more sustainable lab practices. While the UK has recently revised its 25-year Environmental Plan and aims to “eliminate avoidable plastic waste by the end of 2042,” there has been no existing

Image : Céleste Nilges

country-wide programs enforcing sustainable practices to work towards this target. That is the case unless an institution independently was to encourage good practices.

The motivation ultimately lies in financial savings. It isn’t easy to persuade people to change their behaviour given the money that can be saved by using plastics. Tools like LEAF will allow institutions to understand how energy and consumable savings lie and provide incentives for laboratories to implement more environmentallyfriendly practices, such as grant requirements and policies. In the long run, funding bodies should engage in more conversations about the environmental impacts of research and make sustainability a requirement in grant applications. It is encouraging, however, to know that steps are being taken towards sustainable goals.

Dan Hdidouan, project manager of Greening Imperial, found that researchers here are more conscientious about their carbon footprint and “are now being empowered to make a change.”

There is clearly still much room for improvement, with a future end goal not to completely eliminate plastic usage in labs, but rather to reduce the amount of avoidable waste labs produce. Awareness and education will be key to moving towards greener practices, and perhaps Imperial should start with its own students and staff.

After all, it is our responsibility to practice what we preach.

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AI, Captain! A new scientific voyage Christine Parry takes us on a tour

of the not-so-good, the bad and the Robot pets, chess players, and autonomous weapons. Writing a Harry Potter chapter, flipping burgers, or diagnosing cancer.

ugly of Artificial intelligence.

The uses of artificial intelligence technology (AI) are exhaustive, ranging from the artistic composition of music, to the mundane baking of cookies; stopping off at the awesomely disturbing and down-right dodgy along the way.

AI is by no means new. As early as 1950, Alan Turing Computers had to advance their technical published a paper titled ‘Computer Machinery capabilities to handle the complexity of and Intelligence’ exploring the concept of AI instructions AI required. It needed more memory and and igniting our collective imaginations speed, at less cost. A computer’s processing power is now ever since. So what has stirred this new over one trillion times more powerful than in 1956, allowing conversation around AI? to AI really take off. All major powerhouses of the technology industries are now investing heavily in AI. As these investments are realised into products, we may find ourselves are running out of time to combat the risks AI can pose. In taking action, we need to think beyond the relatively one-dimensional safety net of Asimov’s laws from the land of science fiction.

The potential for data sharing abuse in AI is already on our radar. Google-owned subsidiary DeepMind worked with the NHS to deliver a digital patient-record management platform for healthcare workers and subsequently was given free run of immense chunks of personal patient data. Privacy experts have expressed concerns that data could be exploited by Google to mine for future technology ideas and enable Google to monopolise technology within the NHS. The now infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal has made it clear how tech giants can misuse personal data for Machine Learning: learning associations commercial or even political gain. from data samples to hone the predictive accuracy of the system.

Artificial Intelligence: the theory and development of computer systems that can perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence.

Deep Learning: Feeding large amounts of raw data into an analytical system to discover trends, patterns, for the purpose of classification or identification.

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Although worrying, there is a more insidious issue to expose arising from the AI development process itself: end models capable of exhibiting behaviours not designed by the developers. A study of Uber’s algorithmcontrolled pricing model in Washington D.C. found it unintentionally drove up availability of cabs in affluent, white areas and extended the average wait time disproportionately in poorer or areas with a higher population of people of colour.

In the criminal justice system throughout the USA, algorithms are used and trusted to determine the risk of a defendant reoffending upon arrest.

The second is the nature of the code itself or the company who own it. Take Uber’s pricing model – a ‘dynamic’ algorithm, based on supply and demand, it was constantly changing and incredibly difficult for even data scientists to prove misconduct.

Legal friction can be an issue as well – the algorithms can be hidden behind company security walls and inaccessible to interested parties, such as the algorithms used in the US judicial system.

Okay, well what are our weapons against such digital delinquency?

As much transparency as possible.

We need to analyse the method of the algorithm, and see whether, and how, it was validated for public use.

Professor Nick Diakopoulos at Northwestern University, where he is Director of the Computational Journalism Lab, is concerned about the wide-spread use of algorithms in public society and has dedicated his time to auditing them. He has set up a valuable resource http://algorithmtips.org/ for interested parties to learn more.

Asimov’s laws: The three rules a robot should be programmed to obey to safeguard humanity.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

So arm yourself, AI might not just be here to steal your job!

For tips on how to investigate algorithms and leads on algorithms in use in public society, visit http://algorithmtips.org/

I’m talking about journalism.

Freedom of speech in the press has been one of the only options open to the weak and small when confronted with a powerful opponent – our David to the Goliath of Injustice. Usually, technological advances only strengthen the slingshot, for example social media.

Why is AI accountability more elusive?

The first hurdle we must overcome is lack of knowledge and resource. Most journalists with the will to investigate bias in AI technology do not have a way; the pen is their sword, The score provided by the algorithm not the technological tongues that algorithms are directly inform the court’s decision written in. The larger media companies have when sentencing the defendant. More begun to pair journalists with data scientists alarming not only were the decisions based on to redress this balance, but this doesn’t these algorithms found to be biased in favour of solve the problem for freelancers or white defendants and discriminating against black smaller media centres. defendants, a closer analysis found the algorithm was barely more accurate than flipping a coin!

So computerised algorithms are not as neat and logical as expected from an automated system, they can inherit biases from their creators, or from bias implicit in the data they are trained on.

Algorithms need to be evaluated with these inherent flaws in mind – before public use.

Other industries like the pharmaceutical, cosmetics or food industry have to meet national and even international standards, and countless other industry-wide regulations, before introducing a new product. Yet AI technology remains an alarmingly unregulated area of science.

Worse, our most powerful counterbalance against such abuse is in danger.

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Science: The War against Conscience Emily Medcalf investigates the role science and scientists play in developing technology intended to kill.

Science and war have long been intertwined, but their relationship is a complicated and sensitive topic which doesn’t have a clear conscience.

Developing new technologies for war requires scientific input, but does success in war technologies equate to good or bad science?

‘Good’ scientists can be involved in the creation of ‘bad’ science. Take Franz Haber, a German chemist who developed the Haber-Bosch process which turns nitrogen into ammonia, part of the process used to make fertilisers. Given half the world’s population is fed by food that uses fertilisers, he has had a largely positive impact on the world in this regard.

However, he is widely known as the ‘father of chemical warfare’ as he proposed the use of chlorine gas in WWI and developed other toxic gases designed to kill. He was supposedly unaware of how devastating the consequences of this would be.

Another famous example is J.R. Oppenheimer, the American physicist who made many important contributions to physics and quantum mechanics, but who is more commonly known as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ due to his contributions to the Manhattan project. The impact of his work led to the atomic bombs that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even Albert Einstein, who could be called science’s most famous face, signed papers that convinced President Roosevelt to initiate the Manhattan Project, which he later said he regretted. This raises some difficult questions; are scientists involved in the creation of technology used for war inherently bad? What if they were unaware of the consequences? And how can we learn from these examples?

Fast forward to the modern day. The threat of another world war feels scarily imminent, thanks to a tense

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Images: Céleste Nilges

political climate and some rather exuberant world leaders. Add to that tension, a recent UK Ministry of Defence report entitled ‘The Future Starts Today,’ and we can see just how seriously we need to take this issue.

In response to the report, Secretary of State for Defence Gavin Williamson said, that “we are living in a world that is becoming rapidly more dangerous, with intensifying challenges from state aggressors who flout the rules, terrorists who want to harm our way of life and the technological race with our adversaries”.

Technology is progressing at an alarmingly fast rate and many new technologies have direct application in war. The report details the potential for “human enhancement,” including “gene editing, physical and cognitive prosthesis and pharmaceutical enhancement.” There are growing fears over the “weaponisation” of neuroscience, whereby drugs may be used to reduce sleep deprivation, enable stress resistance, and enhance cognitive performance in soldiers.

The Brain Waves project produced by the Royal Society warns that the neuropeptide oxytocin, which improves prosocial bonding and trust, could be used by interrogators to gain trust from their subjects and make them more docile.

Further technological advancements include 3D-printed weapons, drone swarms, and, perhaps the most sinister, autonomous weapons. These weapons would have the ability to identify and attack targets based on algorithms and, combined with facial recognition technology, could identify and target specific individuals. Supposed benefits include fewer civilian casualties and a reduction in human error, but the idea of giving all control to weapons is certainly frightening. In fact, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk both included their signatures on a 2015 petition

demanding a ban on autonomous weapons. However, progress towards an international treaty to fully ban such weapons was blocked last September by countries including the USA and Russia.

So, is there no way to end the toxic relationship between science and war? Perhaps the consequences of improving technology with a purpose in war may be brushed past because it’s innovative and exciting. While researching this article, I found a few accounts stating how the Manhattan project is a prime example of excellent scientific cooperation and achievement.

While this is certainly true, it worries me that a cause of such terrible destruction and suffering can be viewed in such a positive light, seemingly overlooking the consequences that ‘good science’ and innovation provoked. Surely one of the most important aspects of science is the impact it has on the world, so while the technologies that are currently being evolved are certainly exciting, we should take a step back to truly think how science affects people.

Ultimately however, scientists may not have a say in how their science is used. One of the inventors of pepper spray, Kamran Loghman, has stated his disapproval at police departments using the spray to stop protestors. Russian inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle Mikhail Kalashnikov deeply regretted his invention and wrote a letter to the Russian Orthodox Church in 2012 asking whether he was to blame for the countless deaths his rifle caused. And, as previously mentioned, some of the scientists involved in the creation of the atomic bomb deeply regret it. So ultimately, what can we do, and what should we do?

If only there was a straightforward answer.

In 1868, the HMS Topaze came upon an island in the South Pacific Ocean.

As they explored the island, the crew found ornately carved statues of large heads. They selected the most magnificent of these statues and brought it back to their ship. The statue would later be gifted to Queen Victoria who in turn would give it to the British Museum where it has remained ever since.

were housed in the Musée de l’Homme.

Following Nelson Mandela’s victory in the Presidential elections in South Africa, he requested the French government to return Baartman’s remains. During the negotiations, an assistant curator of the museum argued; “We never know what science will be able to tell us in the future. If she is buried, this chance will be lost ... for us she remains a very important treasure.”

Such thinking, and from a scientific A delegation from the island, viewpoint, illustrates how artefacts, and known to us as Easter Island, indeed human remains, from indigenous and to natives as Rapa Nui, cultures are housed in museums, for travelled to the British Museum display, and to further scientific in November of last year. knowledge. The question becomes Descendants of the indigenous one of ownership and whether people who carved the Easter western museums have the right to Island statues. Footage of the visit display objects, and people, they has been viewed across the world, stole from other countries, and place as the Island Governor tearfully a western context on them rather describes the importance of the than that of the native people. stolen statue to their people.

Image: William Warby They want the statue returned In March 2002, Sara Baartman was to the Island; the British returned home to South Africa Museum has declared they can where she was buried.

Aoife Hardesty examines the scientific consider a loan but not on a permanent basis. justifications for displaying objects, and Many people of indigenous

Cultures on Display

Within the British Museum, the head, called Hoa Hakananai’a, is displayed as a piece of human history, whilst not taking into account the very real meaning of the statue to the Rapa Nui people.

Each statue was carved to contain the spirits of important members of their tribe or deified ancestors. To the Rapa Nui people, Hoa Hakananai’a is their ancestor.

people, from indigenous cultures.

Too often this is how the lives and cultures of indigenous people are displayed in museums, as relics of time gone past, not accounting for the living people for whom these artefacts hold a unique importance. Too often, such exhibits are found in Natural History Museums, presenting culturally significant objects for western society to marvel at the strangeness of indigenous cultures, and not fully respecting them.

The American Museum of Natural History features a ‘Hall of Native South American People.’ This gallery features tools, technologies, and traditions of ancient cultures of South America as well as modern indigenous South Americans.

Exhibiting cultural history in a museum

of Natural History is questionable, as it perpetuates notions of indigenous peoples as ‘other’ and somehow not fully human.

Indigenous peoples’ culture may still be exhibited as objects of curiosity, letting western society gawk at the accomplishments of the uncivilised savages.

Western society has long had a tendency to exhibit indigenous people for entertainment, or to fit a scientific agenda.

A young woman named Sara Baartman from South Africa was used by the famous natural historian George Cuvier in the early 1800s to prove native Africans as the missing link between apes and humans.

Baartman was bought in South Africa and taken to England, then Paris, where she was displayed in a human zoo, mostly naked to show off her large bum cheeks.

Following Sara’s death, Cuvier dissected her body and used his findings from the dissection to ‘prove’ his case. Her remains

cultures were taken to western places and exhibited. Another

example is that of Joice Heith, who was put on display by P.T. Barnum, whose work as an entertainer has been recently glorified in the Greatest Showman. Heith was a black woman and former slave who Barnum claimed was hundreds of years old and had nursed George Washington. Upon her death, Barnum held a public dissection where it was revealed that the woman had lied about her age and had hoodwinked everyone, including Barnum.

We like to think we’ve moved on from human zoos, but still indigenous cultures are exhibited to Western society with the context of scientific advancement. Still artefacts of cultural significance are kept in the hands of former colonisers to advance scientific knowledge instead of respecting the wishes of indigenous people.

As views change and greater importance is in the wider public eye placed on distancing ourselves from colonial-era views of race, culture, these questions of how pieces of a distinct culture to our should be presented.

As too are questions of ownership and remunerations, of which Hoa Hakananai’a is but one of a number of high profile cases.

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Flying Too Close to the Sun?

The myth of Daedalus and Icarus is one of the oldest cautionary tales. It tells of a father and son imprisoned in a Cretan tower. Daedalus, a noted inventor, hatches a plan of escape: since neither land nor sea are open to them, they would take to the skies. He gathers feathers from the birds that come to roost on their tower and fashions them into two sets of man-sized wings using wax and string.

Once complete, Daedalus dons one pair and gives his son the other. “’Careful,’ he warns Icarus, ‘If you fly too low to the water, the mist may dampen your wings. Fly too high, and the sun will melt the wax that holds 24them together.’”

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They take off, soaring through the air as smoothly as the birds they borrowed from. But Icarus, losing himself in the pleasure of flight, begins to rise – higher, higher, until the sun’s rays burn in greeting. The wax between his feathers starts to melt. His wings disintegrate until they can no longer sustain flight, and Icarus – his father’s prescient counsel ringing in his ears – falls to his doom.

argued that by integrating functional wings into his own body, Daedalus had performed the first successful grafting of body parts from one animal species to another.

Of course, this myth is just that – a myth. Nowadays, the field of xenotransplantation has settled into the realms of medicine and science with more realistic, but similarly lofty goals.

*PQ: Xenotransplantation is the transfer of living cells, tissue or organs from one species to another.*

For decades, scientists and doctors have been fascinated by the idea that human organs can be replaced by the equivalent structures of other animals. Attempts to prove this notion, however, have ubiquitously resulted in rather Icarian narratives. The most notorious of these cases is that of Stephanie Beauclair, or as she is better known: Baby Fae.

Surgical pioneer Ketih Reemstma credited Daedalus as one of the earliest practitioners of xenotransplantation, or crossspecies organ transfer. Reemstma

Stephanie was born in the fall of 1983 – 5 pounds and 9 ounces, 13 inches long, and possessing a critical congenital heart defect that shortened her life expectancy to less than one month.

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Image: Riko Yasumiya

Making a case for Xenotransplantation, Tristan Varela talks of myths, science and baboon hearts.

Her parents were distraught.

Acquiring donor organs for infants was virtually impossible at the time.

The end was inevitable, or so it seemed. Then along came Dr Leonard Bailey, who offered the Beauclairs a radical option to alter the course of fate: he wanted to give Stephanie a baboon heart. The procedure was mired with controversy, but nevertheless allowed to proceed due to the urgency of the case.

And so Baby Fae received a new heart, courtesy of a baboon that was also designated, coincidentally, with the initial F. At first, the graft seemed successful – the heart worked.

Stephanie was said to be “perking along,” getting stronger, and gaining weight. Sadly, her progress was short-lived; less than two weeks later, Stephanie’s body began to reject the foreign organ. She was placed back in an incubator and given a course of immunosuppressants but to no avail. The heart failed, and Stephanie died, only two days past the first month of her infancy.

In the UK, about 450 people die each year while on the active transplant waiting list. Graft rejection is a major concern even in organ transplants between humans, so it is unsurprising that cross species compatibility is such a complex issue to untangle.

In Stephanie’s case, it appeared that her antibodies had induced clumping of the baboon red blood cells and damaged the foreign cardiac tissue. This was further compounded by the fact that Stephanie’s blood type was O, while baboon F had been type AB. Despite Keith Reemstma’s

assertion that Daedalus was a pioneer of cross-species corporeal carpentry, it is evident that xenotransplantation is nowhere near as simple as strapping a pair of makeshift wings to one’s arms.

Still, the implications of realising interspecies transplants would be immense. Worldwide, there are more people in need of donor organs than there are people to provide them. In the UK, about 450 people die each year while on the active transplant waiting list, and even more are removed from the list due to their health deteriorating beyond the scope of medical intervention. In America, the outlook is bleaker, with 20 people dying each day while waiting for new organs.

The difficulty of xenotransplantation lies not only in mitigating the chances of graft rejection, but also in finding animal organs of the appropriate size and functionality in the first place. In addition to Baby Fae, there have been several other documented attempts at transplanting primate organs into humans (not just hearts, but also kidneys and livers) based on the notion of high genetic and physiological similarities between humans, monkeys and apes.

Graft rejection is a major concern even in organ transplants between humans, so it is unsurprising cross species compatibility is tricky ground.

In recent times, however, the hunt for a novel candidate for human-applicable xenotransplantation has scientists turning not towards jungles, but to farms; for the xenotransplant surgeon’s animal of choice appears to be none other than the humble pig.

Pig organs, it turns out, have a very similar anatomy to humans.

Pigs are also much more readily available than primates, and they possess a lower of risk of zoonotic (animal-to-human) disease transmission. Progress in porcinebased xenotransplantation is slow, but with advancements in genome-editing technology, great strides are being made in making pigs fit for purpose.

For example, CRISPR has been used to create pigs born without PERVS, a memorable acronym for Porcine Endogenous Retroviruses, which could hypothetically infect human hosts after xenotransplantation.

In the UK, about 450 people die each year while on the active transplant waiting list.

The most remarkable breakthrough thus far was reported late in 2018 in the journal Nature, when a team of researchers reported the successful transplantation of pig hearts into baboons. Critical to their success was the use of an oxygenated blood-based solution to maintain optimum organ viability before transplantation and the use of drugs to prevent overgrowth of the transplanted heart after surgery. Their baboons were able to survive up to six months with a transplanted lifesupporting pig heart, thereby inching the dream of therapeutic xenotransplantation a little bit closer to reality.

The ethical complications of xenotransplantation are farreaching, and the opportunity for exploitation must be accounted for. Should we allow blind ambition to govern scientific advancement, we may find ourselves beside Icarus at the bottom of the ocean, wishing we had taken head the advice of his 25 father.

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What happens when a scientist breaks the rules?

Skylar Knight examines the condemnation of Chinese scientist who edited human embryos.

Image: Nur Pirbhai

In November of last year, the birth of the first genetically modified humans was announced. At the same international conference where Dr. He Jiankui first spoke publicly about his study following its revelation, Nobel Laureate Dr. David Baltimore from the California Institute of Technology, “I think there has been a failure of self-regulation by the scientific community.”

In the weeks following the announcement from He, the researcher behind the CRISPR twins study, other scientists have echoed Baltimore’s concerns that the scientific community has some responsibility to bear for what has happened. Whilst science at large, however, is not responsible for the acts of one rogue scientist, other institutions might be.

Last November, He posted several videos on YouTube discussing the births of Lulu and Nana, twin girls genetically modified when they were embryos. While genetic editing on human embryos is not novel (in fact, between the USA, the UK and China there are no less than twelve such studies currently underway), international norms and national regulations require the modified embryos to be terminated.

The video confession from He quickly spread to news outlets across the globe, leaving in its wake shock, awe, and condemnation. Few were as critical of what He had done than his fellow scientists.

“This work sets a dangerous precedent unless there is broad global rejection of the clinical processes used.”

“I am shocked and disgusted by this news,” Dr. Jennifer Doudna told New Scientist. Doudna is one of the scientists who pioneered the CRISPR gene-editing technology used in the study, and believes, “This work sets a dangerous precedent unless there is broad global rejection of the clinical processes used.”

And broad global rejection there was.

As details of the study emerged, it became apparent that He managed to circumvent Chinese national regulations that prevent human genetic editing for reproductive purposes.

Furthermore, He forged documents approving the trial and failed to gain sufficient informed consent from the couples involved in the study.

In total there were seven couples involved in the trial. Besides the parents of Lulu and Nana, Chinese authorities have confirmed that at

How could such a massive study, even with the efforts of He and his team, have avoided being caught? least one other couple from the study is pregnant with a genetically modified embryo.

Throughout all the controversy, regulatory agencies in China have been quick to denounce the actions of He, who has now been fired from his lab at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen.

A few days after the story broke, Xu Nanping, a vice minister for science and technology in China, said that the study, “blatantly violated China’s relevant laws and regulations. It has also violated the ethical bottom line that the academic community adheres to.”

However, a study of this scope would have been ongoing for over a year. In addition, dozens of other people must have been involved in the study. So how could such a massive study, even with the efforts of He and his team, have avoided being caught?

For years China has been criticised for inadequate enforcement of their clinical research regulations. Factors, such as geographic size, burgeoning research spending, and insufficient resource allocation to regulatory bodies are largely to blame. In a 2017 report, the Nuffield Council on

Bioethics analysed these issues as they relate to gene editing research, coming to the prophetic conclusion that, “a shift toward first-in-human applications” was likely to occur.

Importantly, these factors can be seen as directly contributing to the CRISPR twins study. For example, in 2012 He, who was researching at Stanford University in the United States at the time, was given a 1 million yuan (144,000 USD) bonus for moving back to China to continue his research.

This, along with subsequent funding, allowed He the flexibility to take leave from his lab to begin his CRISPR study.

Furthermore, in China’s Thirteenth Five Year Plan, biotechnologies such as CRISPR gene editing are explicitly stated as a key research area to “promote the development of transformative technologies for the future of China’s industrial transformation.” However, unlike other countries pushing for similar developments, China does not require approval from a national regulatory body for each study involving genetically modified embryos. These approvals are instead left to local or institutional regulatory bodies leaving them more susceptible to oversight.

While it is clear that China had all the ingredients necessary for a controversial study of this caliber to occur, it is less clear how responsible this makes them for the study. It is only within the past couple of decades that China has had the stability and economic prosperity to fund cuttingedge scientific research. Yet, already they are leaders in many scientific fields and have a higher output of scientific research than any other nation. Are growing pains not to be expected?

Where China goes from here will be most telling of their commitment to the integrity of the scientific community. Will they redevelop their regulatory processes to prevent another bull from getting into the china shop? Or will they continue to condemn the bull, without stopping to consider how it got into the shop in the first place?

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Image: Bernadeta Dadonaite

May Vilailuck uses the philosophy of science to make a case in defence of what we’ve called ‘bad science’

In defence of

What exactly is ‘bad science’? The answer may not be as straightforward as one expects. Many theories and philosophies have throughout history shaped the way science has been studied, executed and influenced our understanding of what ‘bad science’ is.

While the title may sound in favour of bad science, it is not suggesting

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we conduct bad science. Rather, the point is to make sure terms such as ‘bad science’ and ‘pseudoscience’ are used as accurately as today’s scientific frameworks allow.

Only scientific inquiry can produce apodictic certainty- what has been proven to be necessarily true.

Throughout history, there have been many attempts to demarcate science from non-science. Millenniums ago, Greek philosophers attempted to distinguish their accounts of nature from the mythological explanations of the world of their predecessors and contemporaries. Aristotle said that for an idea to be scientific, it must deal with causes, be conducted logically,

and must identify with what we call know today as common sense.

Above all, however, he said that for something to be considered science it must have apodictic certainty, which is the certainty that it has been demonstrated as necessarily true.

science is seen as either good or bad.

More than two thousand years later, 1920s philosophers in the Berlin and Vienna Circles formulated a new theory called logical positivism.

This school of thought believed that only matters of facts or logical relations made meaningful by empirical verification could be considered science. They believed that any other statements are not considered science and thus be known as “metaphysics.” Later, Austrian philosopher Karl Popper proposed a criterion that would contrast with the Berlin and Vienna Circle’s focus on the meaningfulness of a scientific statement. Popper’s theory of falsifiability, stipulated that for a statement to be scientific it must be “conflicting with possible, or conceivable observations.” In other words, it must be refutable with evidence.

The term ‘paradigm shift,’ coined by American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, describes a fundamental, often radical, change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of scientific disciplines.

Outstanding cases in history include, in chronological order, the shift from a Ptolemaic cosmology (Geocentrism) to a Copernican one (Heliocentrism), the revolution in how evolution is understood (Darwin’s Natural Selection), the discovery of microbes which led to the germ theory of disease, and the transition from classical and Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics and Einsteinian general relativity. Simply said, paradigm shifts define the moments when we realize that science can never be done in the same way from now on.

Paradigm shifts affect how we decide on what is good or bad science.

Since Ancient Greece, philosophers have tackled the demarcation problem: how do we separate science from everything else?

This persisting ‘demarcation problem’ deals with how we distinguish between what is deemed science or non-science, encompassing everything from distinguishing between science and pseudoscience, good and bad science, to science and humanities like the arts, literature, and theologies.

This problem remains relevant today due to the political nature of topics such as climate change, where political and social agendas can affect whether

However, science never stops evolving. Can something that was once considered bad science be regarded as good science as time goes by, and vice versa?

Let’s look at telepathy as a case in determining bad science from the good. Telepathy is the transfer of information from one person to another without the use of any known human sensory channels or physical interactions. But it lacks concrete evidence and records as well as repeatability. Its advocates have also been criticized for trying to ‘prove’ telepathy rather than objectively analyse whether or not it exists.

But is there any scientific merit to telepathy, which we often regard as ‘bad science’ or ‘pseudoscience’?

changes as we learn more. Saying that microbes cause diseases to doctors who were practicing medicine before the advent of the microscope would have made no sense to them, as there would have been no way to prove that those microbes exist. Another analogy would be explaining colours to a blind person. Though not impossible, it is an abstract and difficult task.

For science to evolve, scientists have to be allowed to think differently.

Back our telepathy example; should we fund research on telepathy? I believe we shouldn’t as we are not yet ready.

Does that, however, mean we should dismiss it entirely? What about in a few hundred years? Telepathy to us today is like imagining the internet back in the medieval times; while we do not have to ‘believe’ in it, it would be going overboard to smack the ‘bad science’ or ‘pseudoscience’ label across it just because it is beyond our graspyet.

We should not outright label everything we cannot explain as ‘bad science’. For science to grow, someone has to do something differently which could mean investigating something someone thinks is ‘bad science’. As for pseudosciences, we should be more careful in how we label and talk about them. Pseudoscience is useful in the maturation of our scientific minds; though not as a constructive contribution to knowledge, but because foiling pseudoscience is a convenient way to show the powers of reason and logic.

Stay curious. Stay alert. Question everything before unconditionally slapping a label on it.

What we are capable of discovering

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The Science Charles de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan, and Rihanna have all been said to be passionate advocates amongst the thousands who follow their horoscopes on a daily basis. However, historically and to this day, scientists tend to disregard astrology as a pseudoscience.

Thus, the question remains; does astrology carry any scientific weight?

Lilly Matson surveys the heavens to reveal what the science of Astrology has in store for your future...

By definition, astrology is the study of the movement and relative positions of celestial bodies and their subsequent influence over human affairs and terrestrial events. Horoscopes are considered a branch of astrology that forecast an individual’s future, including a classification of their character, based on the relative location of the stars and planets at the time they were born. While the rudimentary basis of astrology may appear scientific, in as much as it involves the study of space, there is still extensive debate over the legitimacy of the practice.

Amongst other things, a scientific theory is one that should be testable, rely on evidence, lead to ongoing research and, nowadays, lend itself to the involvement of the wider scientific community. A significant shortcoming of astrology, which many claim make it entirely un-scientific, is that the predictions are often so broad and generalised that they are almost impossible to verify. There are only a handful of cases where the results of astrology have been examined in scientific studies. One of these, ‘A double-blind test of astrology,’ was published in Nature in 1985. The experiment was designed with the help of scientists, statisticians, and astrologers employing double-blind techniques to test the accuracy of horoscope predictions.

Nevertheless, the experiment yielded no statistically significant data in support of the astrological hypotheses.

Regardless of controversy and scepticism, a number of studies

Image: Harry Lampart

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have attempted to explain potential personality traits based on birth months. An early study was carried out

by Micel Gauquelin, a psychologist and ‘neo-astrologer,’ who rose to notoriety after publishing his theory dubbed ‘the Mars effect’ in 1955. The concept aimed to explain a correlation between athletic performance and the relative position of Mars; arguing that the top sports stars are more likely to be born when Mars is in a certain location in the sky. The experiment was rigorously replicated over 30 subsequent years but produced very few successful results.

More recently, a study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2010 provided the first evidence for seasonal imprinting of biological clocks in mammals. It was reported that babies born in the summer months were inclined to grow up being more optimistic than those born in the winter, described like an amplified response to seasonal affective disorder. The scientist Percy Seymour published his book The Scientific Proof of Astrology, the astronomy lecturer specifies that although he does not believe in horoscopes, the movement of a number of the planets interfere with the Earth’s magnetic field with meaningful consequences to human life. Seymour argues that the variant levels of exposure to magnetic fields can affect the development of the brains of unborn children.

Despite scientific claims explaining potential distinguishing characteristics between individuals born at different times of the year, most attempts to classify astrology as a certified science have not materialised.

of Astrology?

ARIES 21 March - 19 April Jupiter and Mars are finally aligning, which means you will finally be aligning with the partner of your dreams, probably in the frozen meat aisle in Tesco. Sadly, both Brexit and climate change will come up in conversation over dinner with this one’s parents. Thank you, next.

TAURUS 20 April - 20 May Uranus is ascending for Taurians. It will be a breeze of a week at work for you, and by that, I mean you could be visited by a terrible bout of wind.

Astrology, gastrology, it’s all the same.

GEMINI 21 May- 20 June You’ve had a dreadful week and it is time for some #self-care. Start with an itchy facemask and a too-hot bubble bath. End with advanced yoga and a hideously green smoothie. Try not to do your back in.

CANCER 21 June- 22 July Feeling crabby? Best to scuttle sideways out of a precarious confrontation with colleagues.

Alternatively, feel free to try the chacha-slide.

LEO 23 July- 22 August Lion in the streets and in the sheets.

Best to keep the claws away for the latter, we don’t want any accidents.

You can keep the roar though.

VIRGO 23 August - 22 September The stars are telling you it’s time to take a financial risk. Yes, you know what that means.

Extra guacamole with the next order.

I’ve been studying the stars in detail all month. This is what they told me.

LIBRA 23 September - 22 October You have a ‘super blood wolf lunar eclipse’ on the horizon. According to the internet, this will make you highly emotional and symbolises the end of a cycle. All sounds rather menopausal.

SCORPIO 23 October - 21 November You have a sting in your tail, so don’t be afraid to tell your siblings when they are really annoying you at a family gathering. Once you’ve done that, it’s time you got a scorpion tattoo somewhere on your wrist.

SAGITTARIUS 22 November -21 De cember Neptune is very much encroaching Saturn’s personal space. With that in mind, beware of encroaching strangers with halitosis. Carry gum.

CAPRICORN 22 December - 19 January Capricorns, if you were a household item, you would be a doormat, because you get walked all over. Time to stand up for yourself, baby!

AQUARIUS 20 January - 18 February Mercury is in retrograde, and this week you’ll have to face your greatest fear.

Even if that means making awkward eye contact and light chit-chat with someone on the tube.

PISCES 19 February - 20 March Something fishy is going on in your friendship group. Or it might just be the lunch that leaked all over your bag last week.

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