12 minute read
Blinded by science, again (Thomas Dolby, 1982
Blinded by science, again (Thomas Dolby, 1982)
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ISBN 9781742237374 (pbk.), ISBN 9781742238272 (ebook), ISBN 9781742239163 (ePDF), NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, Australia, 293 pp., 2021.
Reviewed by Neil Mudford
When I first opened this book, to begin reviewing it, I was expecting it to contain many articles on COVID-19. I was surprised to find only four of its thirty articles had anything to do with the disease even though most of the articles would have been written in 2020. So, in spite of the science-related fixation on COVID, day after day in the media throughout the last two years, less than a seventh of this edition of the best Australian science writing is on pandemic-related topics. Additionally, several of these are on aspects of the disease far from the mainstream media’s focus on virus mutation and behaviour and our collective response in formulating efforts to protect people from it.
Thus, the unrelenting public focus on fighting and reacting to COVID seemed at odds with its apparent status here simply as one of many issues.
A moment’s further thought dispels my ill-conceived expectation. The volume has the balanced view, properly aligned with scientific priorities.
First, there are so many other important issues and interesting areas of study being pursued. An emergency in one aspect of existence does not warrant halting all other activities, though plenty of day-to-day activities – handshaking, hugging, travelling, horizontal folk dancing – have had to be wound back. It would be foolish to concentrate too heavily on a single issue, long running though it might be, at the expense of everything else. Second, concerning breadth of coverage, what would be the point of re-hashing the same narrow band of ideas that have been swirling around the public domain for two years now? One of science and scientists’ great strengths is to see issues afresh and uncover a topic’s vital but hidden aspects.
This being an issue of Australian Universities’ Review with a COVID focus, I will consider the COVID articles in detail, highlighting their novel revelations, and then comment briefly on the panoply of the collection’s other creative and insightful articles.
In ‘The virus detectives’, Fiona McMillan presents her and her colleagues’ fast-paced race to understand the new SARS threat that became COVID-19 beginning with the warning being sounded from Wuhan. The advances over the last decade or two in rapid genetic sequencing, the establishment of openly available databanks of the results and the experiences with AIDS and earlier SARS crises showed their worth in allowing the knowledgeable to quickly assess the nature of the disease, recognise the high level of the threat and set about creating the immunological weapons to fight it.
It has been a source of wonder to me, and to others, how it was that the biomedical research community managed to get so many highly effective vaccines created, trialled and available for use in only one year. McMillan answers these questions by taking us through the intricate sequence of events along the way.
The very first question to answer was whether humans could contract the disease from each other or only through exposure to the animals from which it sprang. If the former, then the disease was a tremendous danger and a rapid, massive, international response was required. If otherwise, the problem could be tackled locally.
Recognising the potential dangers, Chinese scientists sequenced the genome as soon as they could and made the results available worldwide. This allowed researchers around the world, with a whole array of knowledge and skills, to examine the genome and deduce its behaviour. The answer was ‘yes’, there will be human-human transmission. Thus, the research community received an early ‘heads up’ and knew they had to spring into action and the story takes off from there.
This didn’t stop the Chinese scientists being criticised for being secretive and even for creating the disease in a secret laboratory. I am glad to see those scientists receiving here due praise for their quick and scientific response.
McMillan makes several points about the research community’s state of preparedness and the scale and intensity of the mighty effort that produced the understanding and the medical solutions.
One point she makes is that the researchers should be accorded the ‘frontline worker’ status granted to hospital workers and other similarly indispensable folk. Researchers worked incredible hours over that first year and beyond, just as other frontline staff did. They also suffered tension and burnout and the other effects of a stressful, high stakes existence. The suffering is not the central point, of course, it’s the desperate need for what the researchers can contribute to the emergency, undertaking tasks of which few in the world are capable.
As you can probably appreciate, this recognition is unlikely to eventuate. I suspect one of the reasons for this is the public’s image of researchers and the work they do. Most people, at least in wealthy countries with well-developed health services, have seen nurses and doctors going about their business but few people have been inside a research laboratory or a medical computational facility and mingled with these research beings there. I am sure that, to most, a researcher’s working life is a mystery and probably seems relatively cushy. (I consulted a dictionary just now, to check that ‘cushy’ wasn’t too informal a word to use in a journal article. The entry gave the following usage example, ‘he doesn’t have anything like the cushy life you professors have’. I rest my case.)
Another two points McMillan makes is that the experts around the world cooperated magnificently and unsparingly and that the expertise needed for success was wide-ranging and sometimes found in odd pockets. For instance, Kathie Seley-Radtke, a researcher who ‘specialises in the design of small anti-viral molecules’ comments about the origins of her expertise saying, ‘Like many things in science, this began a bit unintentionally.’ This is a lesson in why interest-driven research is needed. There’s nothing wrong with the research that has an identified endpoint, beloved by advertising executive-led governments, but so often its pursuit of the fascinating puzzle that leads to profound discovery. This can arise within a ‘prefocussed’ research project but there would still have to be a willingness there to head off in a ‘risky’ direction which may not be welcomed in that environment.
Then there are the surprise social and environmental sideeffects of COVID. Donna Lu, in ‘Guarding the guardians’, informs us that the advent of COVID has curtailed the usual levels of active environmental protection. The mechanisms of this are complex. For example, in many places, national park funding comes from eco-tourism. Like all tourism, this has declined sharply under travel restrictions and general travel nervousness. Consequently, funding for rangers dries up and poachers move in. At the same time, the extra economic privations in poor countries increase the population’s dependence on items such as bushmeat for nutrition.
Vegetation is not spared. Satellite imaging reveals that illegal forest clearing has risen sharply during the pandemic.
In ‘The search for animals harbouring coronavirus – and why it matters’, Smritri Mallaparty describes the search for coronavirus in animal populations – wild and domestic. The mutation that facilitated the virus’ leap into humans also gave it an entrée into other animal populations. The worry is that, if it infects these populations, other transmission pathways will open up that would be very difficult to curtail; perhaps impossible if the new hosts are wild animals. Worse than that, the virus could mutate in these populations and then jump back to humans. A fiendish problem.
The fourth COVID-related article is the most harrowing. This is not because it tells us something new and awful about COVID. Rather, it is because the article also deals with another, more fearsome issue – climate change. Jo Chandler’s ‘The COVID-climate collision.’ looks into how the two crises interact.
It is worth noting that this article was a Runner-Up in the UNSW Press Bragg Prize for Science Writing, receiving $1500 prize money. Meanwhile, Fiona McMillan’s article, discussed above, was short-listed in the same competition.
Jo Chandler writes her article during lockdown in COVIDhit Melbourne. Along with other Australians, she and her family were under great stress over the pandemic itself and the tensions of being cooped up at home for a period that ended up lasting 112 days.
This is stressful enough, of course, but as a science journalist Chandler is brought face to face with researchers at the forefront of climate science relaying their latest findings. She corresponds with them over Zoom as part of her job of explaining science to the public. Consequently, the terrible news of ever-accelerating environmental destruction and worsening predictions of the climate future we face assail her every day. Ever rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, coral bleaching, glacier melting, the climate modelling predictions of 3 to 4°C warming in the near future are continually on her mind. Climate change progression is far worse than we are told, she says, and she is in a position to know. Chandler points out that journalists are reluctant to report the full horror of the disasters because they would face a barrage of criticism for being ‘alarmist’.
Chandler writes in a such a powerful and evocative way that I couldn’t help being caught up in her horror at what is before us and the anguish this generates. I have never run away from a book I am reviewing but I came within a whisker of it with this one.
As to the interaction of the two issues, the worst part is probably that the focus on COVID has pushed climate change out of the public’s gaze. Yes, the virus is a great concern but the whole planet’s climate disease is by far the greater danger. COVID will not kill us all but climate change might well do just that and put paid to untold other species as well.
Towards the end of the article, the author takes heart from the world’s response to COVID, saying that we have proved that we can take action against a global threat and therefore we still might act decisively and quickly enough to avoid disaster.
I wonder, though, whether she still holds that view today. The latest of the dates attached to her sub-chapters is November 2020, well before the Delta and Omicron variants hit and while governments were still following health advice. Now, in early 2022, many of the weapons in our armoury have lost their effectiveness – lockdowns have gone, checking in at venues and contact tracing have fallen away, testing has passed from the province of pathology laboratories to individuals using less reliable test kits (when they can find them for sale). Arguably we have lost the pandemic fight and must now treat the victims as best we can and hobble along with daily necessities scarce through factors such as illness of supplier company employees. Still, we live in hope.
As ever with the volumes in this series, the articles span a sweeping range of fields and topics. As editor Dyani Lewis says in her Introduction, ‘The best science writing doesn’t just lay out facts, or even simply parse competing theories. It propels the reader forward with a gripping story.’ The articles here certainly do that to bring us exciting developments across the spectrum.
I say, ‘articles’ but they are not always the works of prose conjured up by that term, though most are. There are poems on Einstein’s brain, one entitled ‘10 monostitch poems’ – evocative and about climate change, Enos the chimp fired into orbit and accidentally electrocuted (but uninjured) in the USA space program’s early days and the remains of bush fire. What more diversity could you want?
When I reviewed ‘Best Australian Science Writing 2020’ by Sara Phillips, Ed. for issue 63(2) of Australian Universities’ Review, I was taken aback by the number of articles in which scientists expressed almost terminal despair in their work. Most often, these were environmental researchers reporting severe environmental degradation while having their warning calls ignored by those with the power to remedy the decline but refusing to use it.
By contrast, I cannot see similar examples here except for the concern expressed in Donna Lu’s and Jo Chandler’s articles.
Alice Gorman’s article, ‘Space junk’, could have been a cause for sounding alarm bells. She mentions the Kessler syndrome. The relative speeds of items in orbit are in the kilometres per second range. Hence, even a small orbiting fragment, such as a nut or an escaped spanner, is like a super high-speed bullet and can therefore destroy a satellite. Each spacecraft collision explodes the spacecraft into many fragments thereby greatly adding to the total items of junk whizzing around up there. The Kessler syndrome is the term for the ultimate endpoint of this process – such a fragment cloud is produced at the affected altitude that any satellites subsequently launched into it are quickly destroyed making that altitude useless for hosting satellites.
The passage with the direst warning in the article is ‘... we have thus far made little progress in solving the growing problem of space junk. Time, however, may be running out.’ Very quiet language for a warning that a pressing problem exists that would herald the end of satellite-based internet, weather prediction and GPS services, amongst others. Gorman, whose research is in the area of the archaeology and heritage of space exploration, urges that we give consideration to the cultural and historic value of old satellites before removing them. A fair point but time is definitely running out and a resolution of the tension between historical preservation and the use of space is needed. Many other impediments also stand in the way of a solution.
Most of the articles in this edition convey a cheering, upbeat message about science discoveries. This is a good thing. It is an exciting activity, and I am glad that I chose to be a scientist! I don’t expect the absence of despair in the articles of the current volume means that, in the space of one year, environmental problems have been cleared up. Rather, I am supposing it is a statistical fluctuation in science writing or in editorial choices for the series.
Let’s see what next year brings!
Neil Mudford is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the University of Queensland and is an AUR Editorial Board member. Contact: neil.mudford@bigpond.com
