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It’s been two decades since the Human Genome Project first unveiled a rough draft of our genetic instruction book. The promise of that medical moon shot was that doctors would soon be able to look at an individual’s DNA and prescribe the right medicines for that person’s illness or even prevent certain diseases.

That promise, known as precision medicine, has yet to be fulfilled in any widespread way. True, researchers are getting clues about some genetic variants linked to certain conditions and some that affect how drugs work in the body. But many of those advances have benefited just one group: people whose ancestral roots stem from Europe. In other words, white people.

Instead of a truly human genome that represents everyone, “what we have is essentially a European genome,” says Constance Hilliard, an evolutionary historian at the University of North Texas in Denton. “That data doesn’t work for anybody apart from people of European ancestry.”

She’s talking about more than the Human Genome Project’s reference genome. That database is just one of many that researchers are using to develop precision medicine strategies. Often those genetic databases draw on data mainly from white participants. But race isn’t the issue. The problem is that collectively, those data add up to a catalog of genetic variants that don’t represent the full range of human genetic diversity.

When people of African, Asian, Native American or Pacific Island ancestry get a DNA test to determine if they inherited a variant that may cause cancer or if a particular drug will work for them, they’re often left with more questions than answers. The results often reveal “variants of uncertain significance,” leaving doctors with too little useful information. This happens less often for people of European descent. That disparity could change if genetics included a more diverse group of participants, researchers agree (SN: 9/17/16, p. 8).

One solution is to make customized reference genomes for populations whose members die from cancer or heart disease at higher rates than other groups, for example, or who face other worse health outcomes, Hilliard suggests.

And the more specific the better. For instance, African Americans who descended from enslaved people have geographic and ecological origins as well as evolutionary and social histories distinct from those of recent African immigrants to the United States. Those histories have left stamps in the DNA that can make a difference in people’s health today. The same goes for Indigenous people from various parts of the world and Latino people from Mexico versus the Caribbean or Central or South America.

Researchers have made efforts to boost diversity among participants in genetic studies, but there is still a long way to go. How to involve more people of diverse backgrounds — which goes beyond race and ethnicity to include geographic, social and economic diversity — in genetic research is fraught with thorny ethical questions.

To bring the public into the conversation, Science News posed some core questions to readers who watched a short video of Hilliard explaining her views.

Again and again, respondents to our unscientific survey said that genetic research is important for improving medical care. But our mostly white respondents had mixed feelings about whether the solution is customized projects such as Hilliard proposes or a more generalized effort to add variants to the existing human reference genome. Many people were concerned that pointing out genetic differences may reinforce mistaken concepts of racial inferiority and superiority, and lead to more discrimination.

Why is genetics so white?

Some of our readers asked how genetic research got to this state in the first place. Why is genetic research so white and what do we do about it?

Let’s start with the project that makes precision medicine even a possibility: the Human Genome Project, which produced the human reference genome, a sort of master blueprint of the genetic makeup of humans. The reference genome was built initially from the DNA of people who answered an ad in the Buffalo News in 1997.

Although many people think the reference genome is mostly white, it’s not, says Valerie Schneider, a staff scientist at the U.S. National Library of Medicine and a member of the Genome Reference Consortium, the group charged with maintaining the reference genome. The database is a mishmash of more than 60 people’s DNA.

An African American man, dubbed RP11, contributed 70 percent of the DNA in the reference genome. About half of his DNA was inherited from European ancestors, and half from ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa. Another 10 people, including at least one East Asian person and seven of European descent, together contributed about 23 percent of the DNA. And more than 50 people’s DNA is represented in the remaining 7 percent of the reference, Schneider says. Information about the racial and ethnic backgrounds of most of the contributors is unknown, she says.

All humans have basically the same DNA. Any two people are 99.9 percent genetically identical. That’s why having a reference genome makes sense. But the 0.1 percent difference between individuals — all the spelling variations, typos, insertions and deletions sprinkled throughout the text of the human instruction book — contributes to differences in health and disease.

Much of what is known about how that 0.1 percent genetic difference affects health comes from a type of research called genome-wide association studies, or GWAS. In such studies, scientists compare DNA from people with a particular disease with DNA from those who don’t have the disease. The aim is to uncover common genetic variants that might explain why one person is susceptible to that illness while another isn’t.

In 2018, people of European ancestry made up more than 78 percent of GWAS participants, researchers reported in Cell in 2019. That’s an improvement from 2009, when 96 percent of participants had European ancestors, researchers reported in Nature.

Most of the research funded by the major supporter of U.S. biomedical research, the National Institutes of Health, is done by scientists who identify as white, says Sam Oh, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Black and Hispanic researchers collectively receive about 6 percent of research project grants, according to NIH data.

“Generally, the participants who are easier to recruit are people who look like the scientists themselves — people who share similar language, similar culture. It’s easier to establish a rapport and you may already have inroads into communities you’re trying to recruit,” Oh says.

When origins matter

Hilliard’s hypothesis is that precision medicine, which tailors treatments based on a person’s genetic data, lifestyle, environment and physiology, is more likely to succeed when researchers consider the histories of groups that have worse health outcomes. For instance, Black Americans descended from enslaved people have higher rates of kidney disease and high blood pressure, and higher death rates from certain cancers than other U.S. racial and ethnic groups.

In her work as an evolutionary historian studying the people and cultures of West Africa, Hilliard may have uncovered one reason that African Americans descended from enslaved people die from certain types of breast and prostate cancers at higher rates than white people, but have lower rates of the brittle-bone disease osteoporosis. African Americans have a variant of a gene called TRPV6 that helps their cells take up calcium. Overactive TRPV6 is also a hallmark of those breast and prostate cancers that disproportionately kill Black people in the United States.

The variant can be traced back to the ancestors of some African Americans: Niger-Congo–speaking West Africans. In that part of West Africa, the tsetse fly kills cattle, making dairy farming unsustainable. Those ancestral people typically consumed a scant 200 to 400 milligrams of calcium per day. The calcium-absorbing version of TRPV6 helped the body meet its calcium needs, Hilliard hypothesizes. Today, descendents of some of those people still carry the more absorbent version of the gene, but consume more than 800 milligrams of calcium each day.

Assuming that African American women have the same dietary need for calcium as women of European descent may lead doctors to recommend higher calcium intake, which may inadvertently encourage growth of breast and prostate cancers, Hilliard reported in the Journal of Cancer Research & Therapy in 2018.

“Nobody is connecting the dots,” Hilliard says, because most research has focused on the European version of TRPV6.

One size doesn’t fit all

Some doctors and researchers advocate for racialized medicine in which race is used as proxy for a patient’s genetic makeup, and treatments are tailored accordingly. But racialized medicine can backfire. Take the blood thinner clopidogrel, sold under the brand name Plavix. It is prescribed to people at risk of heart attack or stroke. An enzyme called CYP2C19 converts the drug to its active form in the liver.

Some versions of the enzyme don’t convert the drug to its active form very well, if at all. “If you have the enzyme gene variant that will not convert [the drug], you’re essentially taking a placebo, and you’re paying 10 times more for something that will not do what something else — aspirin — will do,” Oh says.

The inactive versions are more common among Asians and Pacific Islanders than among people of African or European ancestry. But just saying that the drug won’t work for someone who ticked the Pacific Islander box on a medical history form is too simplistic. About 60 to 70 percent of people from the Melanesian island nation of Vanuatu carry the inactive forms. But only about 4 percent of fellow Pacific Islanders from Fiji and the Polynesian islands of Samoa, Tonga and the Cook Islands, and 8 percent of New Zealand’s Maori people have the inactive forms.

Assuming that someone has a poorly performing enzyme based on their ethnicity is unhelpful, according to Nuala Helsby of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. These examples “reiterate the importance of assessing the individual patient rather than relying on inappropriate ethnicity-based assumptions for drug dosing decisions,” she wrote in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology in 2016.

A far better approach than either assuming that ethnicity indicates genetic makeup or that everyone is like Europeans is to analyze a person’s DNA and have a precise reference genome to compare it against, Hilliard says. Deciding which genomes to create should be based on known health disparities.

“We have to stop talking about race, and we have to stop talking about color blindness.” Instead, researchers need to consider the very particular circumstances and environments that a person’s ancestors adapted to, Hilliard stresses.

What is diversity in genetics?

Recruiting people from all over the world to participate in genetic research might seem like the way to increase diversity, but that’s a fallacy, Hilliard says. If you really want genetic diversity, look to Africa, she says.

Humans originated in Africa, and the continent is home to the most genetically diverse people in the world. Ancestors of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders carry only part of that diversity, so sequencing genomes from geographically dispersed people won’t capture the full range of variants. But sequencing genomes of 3 million people in Africa could accomplish that task, medical geneticist Ambroise Wonkam of the University of Cape Town in South Africa proposed February 10 in Nature (SN Online: 2/22/21).

Wonkam is a leader in H3Africa, or Human Heredity and Health in Africa. That project has cataloged genetic diversity in sub-Saharan Africa by deciphering the genomes of 426 people representing 50 groups on the continent. The team found more than 3 million genetic variants that had never been seen before, the researchers reported October 28 in Nature. “What we found is that populations that are not well represented in current databases are where we got the most bang for the buck; you see so much more variation there,” says Neil Hanchard, a geneticist and physician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

What’s more, groups living side by side can be genetically distinct. For instance, the Berom of Nigeria, a large ethnic population of about 2 million people, has a genetic profile more similar to East African groups than to neighboring West African groups. In many genetic studies, scientists use another large Nigerian group, the Yoruba, “as the go-to for Africa. But that’s probably not representative of Nigeria, let alone Africa,” Hanchard says.

That’s why Hilliard argues for separate reference genomes or similar tools for groups with health problems that may be linked to their genetic and localized geographic ancestry. For West Africa, for example, this might mean different reference datasets for groups from the coast and those from more inland regions, the birthplace of many African Americans’ ancestors.

Some countries have begun building specialized reference genomes. China compiled a reference of the world’s largest ethnic group, Han Chinese. A recent analysis indicates that Han Chinese people can be divided into six subgroups hailing from different parts of the country. China’s genome project is also compiling data on nine ethnic minorities within its borders. Denmark, Japan and South Korea also are creating country-specific reference genomes and cataloging genetic variants that might contribute to health problems that their populations face. Whether this approach will improve medical care remains to be seen.

People often have the notion that human groups exist as discrete, isolated populations, says Alice Popejoy, a public health geneticist and computational biologist at Stanford University. “But we really have, as a human species, been moving around and mixing and mingling for hundreds of thousands of years,” she says. “It gets very complicated when you start talking about different reference genomes for different groups.” There are no easy dividing lines. Even if separate reference genomes were built, it’s not clear how a doctor would decide which reference is appropriate for an individual patient.

Discrimination worries

One big drawback to Hilliard’s proposal may be social rather than scientific, according to some Science News readers.

Many respondents to our survey expressed concern that even well-intentioned scientists might do research that ultimately increases bias and discrimination toward certain groups. As one reader put it, “The idea of diversity is being stretched into an arena where racial differences will be emphasized and commonalities minimized. This is truly the entry to a racist philosophy.”

Another reader commented, “The fear is that any differences that are found would be exploited by those who want to denigrate others.” Another added, “The idea that there are large genetic differences between populations is a can of worms, isn’t it?”

Indeed, the Chinese government has come under fire for using DNA to identify members of the Uighur Muslim ethnic group, singling them out for surveillance and sending some to “reeducation camps.”

People need a better understanding of what it means when geneticists talk about human diversity, says Charles Rotimi, a genetic epidemiologist and director of the Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, or NHGRI, in Bethesda, Md. He suggests beginning with “our common ancestry, where we all started before we went to different environments.” Because the human genome is able to adapt to different environments, humans carry signatures of some of the geographic locations where their ancestors settled. “We need to understand how this influenced our biology and our history,” Rotimi says.

Researchers can work to understand the genetic diversity within our genome “without invoking old prejudices, without putting our own social constructs on it,” he says. “I don’t think the problem is the genome. I think the problem is humanity.”

Lawrence Brody, director of NHGRI’s Division of Genomics and Society, agrees: “The scientists of today have to own the discrimination that happened in the generations before, like the Tuskegee experiment, even though we’re very far removed from that.” During the infamous Tuskegee experiment, African American men with syphilis were not given treatment that could have cured the infection.

“We want the fruits of genetic research to be shared by everyone,” Brody says. It’s important to determine when genetic differences contribute to disease and when they don’t. Especially for common diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, genetics may turn out to take a back seat to social and economic factors, such as access to health care and fresh foods, for example, or excessive stress, racism and racial biases in medical care. The only way to know what’s at play is to collect the data, and that includes making sure the data are as diverse as possible. “The ethical issue is to make sure you do it,” Brody says.

Hilliard says that the argument that minorities become more vulnerable when they open themselves to genetic research is valid. “Genomics, like nuclear fusion, can be weaponized and dangerous,” she says in response to readers’ concerns. “Minorities can choose to be left out of the genomic revolution or they can make full use of it,” by adding their genetic data to the mix.

Different priorities

Certain groups are choosing to steer clear, even as scientists try to recruit them into genetic studies. The promise that the communities that donate their DNA will reap the benefits someday can be a hard sell.

“We’re telling these communities that this is going to reduce health disparities,” says Keolu Fox, a Native Hawaiian and human geneticist at the University of California, San Diego. But so far, precision medicine has not produced drugs or led to health benefits for communities of color, he pointed out last July in the New England Journal of Medicine. “I’m really not seeing the impact on [Native Hawaiians], the Navajo Nation, on Cheyenne River, Standing Rock. In the Black and brown communities, the least, the last, the looked over, we’re not seeing the … impact,” Fox says.

That’s because, “we have a real basic infrastructure problem in this country.” Millions of people don’t have health care. “We have people on reservations that don’t have access to clean water, that don’t have the … internet,” he says. Improving infrastructure and access to health care would do much more to erase health disparities than any genetics project could right now, he says.

Many Native American tribes have opted out of genetic research. “People ask, ‘How do we get Indigenous peoples comfortable with engaging with genomics?’ ” says Krystal Tsosie, a member of the Navajo (Diné) Nation, geneticist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and cofounder of the Native Biodata Consortium. “That should never be the question. It sounds coercive, and there’s always an intent in mind when you frame the question that way.” Instead, she says, researchers should be asking how to protect tribes that choose to engage in genetic research.

What would you like to tell the scientists working in this area? Send your thoughts to [email protected].

And issues of privacy become a big deal for small groups, such as the 574 recognized Native American tribal nations in the United States, or isolated religious or cultural groups such as the Amish or Hutterites. If one member of such a group decides to give DNA to a genetic project, that submission may paint a genetic portrait of every member of the group. Such decisions shouldn’t be left in individual hands, Tsosie says; it should be a community decision.

Hilliard says minorities’ resistance to participating in genetic research is about more than a fear of being singled out; it’s the result of being experimented on but seeing medical breakthroughs benefit only white people.

“Medical researchers just need to accomplish something that benefits somebody other than Europeans,” she says. “If Blacks or Native Americans or other underrepresented groups saw even a single example of someone of their ethnicity actually being cured of the many [common] chronic diseases and specific cancers for which they are at high risk, that paranoia would evaporate overnight.”

A century ago, science’s understanding of the brain was primitive, like astronomy before telescopes. Certain brain injuries were known to cause specific problems, like loss of speech or vision, but those findings offered a fuzzy view.

Anatomists had identified nerve cells, or neurons, as key components of the brain and nervous system. But nobody knew how these cells collectively manage the brain’s sophisticated control of behavior, memory or emotions. And nobody knew how neurons communicate, or the intricacies of their connections. For that matter, the research field known as neuroscience — the science of the nervous system — did not exist, becoming known as such only in the 1960s.

Over the last 100 years, brain scientists have built their telescopes. Powerful tools for peering inward have revealed cellular constellations. It’s likely that over 100 different kinds of brain cells communicate with dozens of distinct chemicals. A single neuron, scientists have discovered, can connect to tens of thousands of other cells.

Yet neuroscience, though no longer in its infancy, is far from mature.

Today, making sense of the brain’s vexing complexity is harder than ever. Advanced technologies and expanded computing capacity churn out torrents of information. “We have vastly more data … than we ever had before, period,” says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute in Seattle. Yet we still don’t have a satisfying explanation of how the brain operates. We may never understand brains in the way we understand rainbows, or black holes, or DNA.

Deeper revelations may come from studying the vast arrays of neural connections that move information from one part of the brain to another. Using the latest brain mapping technologies, scientists have begun drawing detailed maps of those neural highways, compiling a comprehensive atlas of the brain’s communication systems, known as the connectome.

Those maps are providing a more realistic picture than early work that emphasized the roles of certain brain areas over the connections among them, says Michael D. Fox, a neuroscientist who directs the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Scientists now know that the dot on the map is less important than the roads leading in and out.

“With the building of the human connectome, this wiring diagram of the human brain, we all of a sudden had the resources and the tools to begin to look at [the brain] differently,” Fox says.

Scientists are already starting to use these new brain maps to treat disorders. That’s the main goal of Fox’s center, dedicated to changing brain circuits in ways that alleviate disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. “Maybe for the first time in history, we’ve got the tools to map these symptoms onto human brain circuits, and we’ve got the tools to intervene and modulate these circuits,” Fox says.

The goal sounds grandiose, but Fox doesn’t think it’s a stretch. “My deadline is a decade from now,” he says.

Whether it’s 10 years from now or 50, by imagining what’s ahead, we can remind ourselves of the progress that’s already been made, of the neural galaxies that have been discovered and mapped. And we can allow ourselves a moment of wonder at what might come next.

The three fictional vignettes that follow illustrate some of those future possibilities. No doubt they will be wrong in the details, but each is rooted in research that’s under way today, as described in the “reality checks” that follow each imagined scenario.

Science future: brain bots

Sarah had made up her mind. After five years, she was going to get her neural net removed. The millions of nanobots in her brain had given her life back to her, by helping her mind to work again. They had done their job. It was time to get them out.

After Sarah’s baby was born on the summer solstice, things got dark. The following months had tipped Sarah into a postpartum depression that kept her from enjoying her gorgeous, perfect little girl.

Unable to feel much of anything, Sarah barely moved through those early days. She rarely looked at the baby. She forgot to eat. She would sit in a dark room for hours, air conditioner on full blast, staring at nothing. Those endless days stretched until an unseasonably hot September morning. Her mother watched the baby while Sarah’s husband drove her to the Institute for Neuroprosthetics, a low-slung brick building in the suburbs of Nashville.

Inside, Sarah barely listened as the clinic coordinator described the technology again. An injection would deliver the nanobots to her blood. Then a tech would guide the bots, using a magnet, from her arm toward her head. A fast, strong pulse of ultrasound would open the blood-brain barrier temporarily, allowing an army of minuscule particles to slip in.

Powered by the molecular motion inherent in the brain, the nanobots would spread out to form a web of microscopic electrodes. That neural network could pinpoint where Sarah’s brain circuitry was misfiring and repair it with precise but persuasive electrical nudges.

Over the following weeks, Sarah’s nanobots learned the neural rhythms of her brain as she moved through her life with debilitating depression. With powerful computational help — and regular tinkering by the clinic technologist — the system soon learned to spot the earliest neural rumblings of a deteriorating mood. Once those warning signs were clear, Sarah’s web of nanobots could end budding episodes before they could take her down.

Soon after the injection, Sarah’s laugh started to reappear, though sometimes at the wrong times. She recalled the day she and her husband took the baby to a family birthday party. In the middle of a story about her uncle’s dementia treatment, Sarah’s squawks of laughter silenced the room.

Those closest to her understood, but most of her family and friends didn’t know about the millions of bots working to shore up her brain.

After a few months and some adjustments, Sarah’s emotions evened out. The numb, cold depression was gone. Gone too were the inappropriate bursts of laughter, flashes of white rage and insatiable appetites. She was able to settle in with her new family, and feel — really feel — the joy of it all.

But was this joy hers alone? Maybe it belonged to the army of tiny, ever-vigilant helpers, reworking and evening out her brain. Without her neural net, she might have been teary watching her daughter, still her baby, walk into her kindergarten classroom on the first day. Instead, Sarah waved, turned and went to work, feeling only slightly wistful, nothing more intense than that.

The science supporting the success of neural nets was staggering. They could efficiently fix huge problems: addiction, dementia, eating disorders and more. But the science couldn’t answer bigger questions of identity and control — what it means to be a person.

That search for herself is what drove Sarah back to the clinic, five years after she welcomed the nanobots in.

Her technologist went over the simple extraction procedure: a quick ultrasound pulse to loosen the blood-brain barrier again, a strong magnet over the inside of Sarah’s elbow and a blood draw. He looked at her. “You ready?”

She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

Reality check: brain bots

In this story, Sarah received a treatment that doesn’t exist in the real world. But the idea that scientists will be able to change certain brain networks — and improve health — is not fiction. It’s happening.

Already, a technique known as deep brain stimulation, or DBS, uses electrodes surgically implanted in people’s brains to tweak the behavior of brain cells. Such electrode implants are helping reduce Parkinson’s tremors, epileptic seizures and uncontrollable movements caused by Tourette’s syndrome. Mood disorders like Sarah’s have been targeted too.

The central idea of DBS — that the brain can be fixed by stimulating it — is not new. In the 1930s, psychiatrists discovered that a massive wallop of seizure-inducing electricity could sometimes relieve psychiatric symptoms. In the 1940s and 1950s, researchers studied whether more constrained electrical stimulation could help with disorders such as depression.

In 1948, for instance, neurosurgeon J. Lawrence Pool of Columbia University’s Neurological Institute of New York implanted electrodes to stimulate the brain of a woman with severe Parkinson’s who had become depressed and lost weight. Soon, she began to “eat well, put on weight and react in a more cheerful manner,” Pool reported in 1954.

The experiment ended three years later when one of the wires broke. “It is the writer’s conviction that focal controlled stimulation of the human brain is a new technique in psychosurgery that is here to stay,” Pool wrote.

Compared with those early days, today’s scientists understand a lot more about how to selectively influence brain activity. But before a treatment such as Sarah’s is possible, two major challenges must be addressed: Doctors need better tools — nimble and powerful systems that are durable enough to work consistently inside the brain for years — and they need to know where in the brain to target the treatment. That location differs among disorders, and even among people.

These are big problems, but the various pieces needed for this sort of precision healing are beginning to coalesce.

The specs of the technology that will be capable of listening to brain activity and intervening as needed is anyone’s guess. Yet those nanobots that snuck into Sarah’s brain from her blood do have roots in current research. For example, Caltech’s Mikhail Shapiro and colleagues are working toward nanoscale robots that roam the body and act as doctors (SN: 10/10/20 & 10/24/20, p. 27).

Other kinds of sensors are growing up, fast. In the last 20 years, electrodes have improved by an astonishing amount, becoming smaller, more flexible and less likely to scar the brain, says biomedical engineer Cynthia Chestek. When she began working on electrode development in the early 2000s, there were still insolvable problems, she says, including the scars that big, stiff electrodes can leave, and the energy they require to operate. “We didn’t know if anybody was ever going to deal with them.”

But those problems have largely been overcome, says Chestek, whose lab team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor develops carbon fiber electrodes. Imagine the future, Chestek says. “You could have thousands of electrodes safely interfacing with neurons. At that point, it becomes really standard medical practice.”

Neural dust — minuscule electrodes powered by external ultrasounds — already can pick up nerve and muscle activity in rats. Neuropixels can record electrical activity from over 10,000 sites in mice’s brains. And mesh electrodes, called neural lace, have been injected into the brains of mice.

Once inside, these nets integrate into the tissue and record brain activity from many cells. So far, these mesh electrodes have captured neural activity over months as the mice have scurried around.

Other systems under development can be controlled with magnets, light or ultrasound. There are still problems to solve, Chestek says, but none are insurmountable. “We just need to figure out the last set of practical tricks,” she says.

Once scientists know how to reliably change brain activity, they need to know where to make the change. Precision targeting is complicated by the fact that ultimately, every part of the brain is connected to every other part, in a very Kevin Bacon way.

Advances in tractography — the study of the physical connections among groups of nerve cells — are pointing to which parts of these neural highways could be targeted to deal with certain problems.

Other studies of people with implanted electrodes reveal brain networks in action. When certain electrodes were stimulated, people experienced immediate and obvious changes in their moods (SN: 2/16/19, p. 22). Those electrodes were near the neural tracts that converge in a brain region just behind and above the eyes called the lateral orbitofrontal cortex.

In the future, we might all have our personalized brain wiring diagrams mapped, Fox says. And perhaps for any symptom — anxiety, food craving or addiction — doctors could find the brain circuit responsible. “Now we’ve got our target,” he says. “We can either hold the neuromodulation tool outside your scalp, or implant a tool inside your head, and we’re going to fix that circuit.”

The hurdles to building a nimble, powerful and precise system similar to the one that helped Sarah are high. But past successes suggest that innovative, aggressive research will find ways around current barriers. For people with mood disorders, addiction, dementia or any other ailment rooted in the brain, those advances can’t come soon enough.

Science future: mind meld

Sofia couldn’t sleep. Tomorrow was the big day. As the project manager for the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, she had overseen years of prize announcements, but never one like this.

At 11:30 a.m. Central European Summer Time tomorrow, the prize would be given to a bird named Harry, a 16-year-old Clark’s nutcracker. Sofia smiled in the dark as she thought about how the news would land.

Harry was to be recognized for benefiting humankind “in his role as a pioneering memory collective that enhances human minds.” Harry would share the prize (and the money) with his two human trainers.

Tomorrow morning, the world would be buzzing, Sofia knew. But as with every Nobel Prize, the story began long before the announcement. Even in the 20th century, scientists had been dreaming of, and tinkering with, merging different kinds of minds.

As the technology got more precise and less invasive, human-to-human links grew seamless, inspired by ancient and intriguing examples of conjoined twins with shared awareness. External headsets could send and receive signals between brains, such as “silent speech” and sights and sounds.

Next, scientists began looking to other species’ brains for different types of skills that might boost our human abilities. Other animals have different ways of seeing, feeling, experiencing and remembering the world. That’s where Harry came in.

Crows, ravens and other corvids have prodigious memories. That’s especially true for Clark’s nutcrackers. These gray and black birds can remember the locations of an estimated 10,000 seed stashes at any given time. These powerful memory abilities soon caught the eye of scientists eager to augment human memory.

The scientists weren’t talking about remembering where the car is parked in the airport lot. They set their sights higher. Done right, these enhancements could allow a person to build stunningly complete internal maps of their world, remembering every place they had ever been. And it turned out that these memory feats didn’t just stop at physical locations. Strengthening one type of memory led to improvements in other kinds of memories too. The systems grew stronger all around.

Harry wasn’t the first bird to link up with humans, but he has been one of the best. As a young bird, Harry underwent several years of intense training (aided by his favorite treat, whitebark pine seeds). Using a sophisticated implanted brain chip, he learned to merge his neural signals with those of a person who was having memory trouble or needed a temporary boost. The connection usually lasted for a few hours a day, but its effects endured. Noticeable improvements in people’s memories held fast for months after a session with Harry. The people who tried it called the change “breathtaking.” The bird had made history.

By showing this sort of human-animal mind meld was possible, and beneficial, Harry and his trainers had helped create an entirely new field, one worthy of Nobel recognition, Sofia thought.

Some scientists are now building on what Harry’s brain could do during these mingling sessions. Others are expanding to different animal abilities: allowing people to “see” in the dark like echolocating bats, or “taste” with their arms like octopuses. Imagine doctors being able to smell diseases, an olfactory skill borrowed from dogs. News outlets were already starting to run interviews with people who had augmented animal awareness.

Still wide awake, Sofia’s mind ran back through the meetings she had held with her communications team over the last week. Tomorrow’s announcement would bring amusement and delight. But she also expected to hear strong objections, from religious groups, animal rights activists and even some ethicists concerned about species blurring. The team was prepared for protests, lots of them.

In the middle of the night, these worries seemed a smidge more substantial to Sofia. Then she thought of Harry flitting around, hiding seeds, and the threat faded away. Sofia marveled at how far the science had come since she was a girl, and how far it was bound to go. Fully exhausted, she rolled over, ready to sleep, ready for tomorrow. She smiled again as she thought about what she’d tell people, if the chance arose: For better or worse, resistance is futile.

Reality check: mind meld

Accepting that a bird could win a Nobel Prize demands a pretty long flight of fancy. But scientists have already directly linked together multiple brains.

Today, the technology that makes such connections possible is just getting off the ground. We are in the “Kitty Hawk” days of brain interface technologies, says computational neuroscientist Rajesh Rao of the University of Washington in Seattle, who is working on brain-based communication systems. In the future, these systems will inevitably fly higher.

Such technology might even take people beyond the confines of their bodies, creating a sort of extended cognition, possibly enabling new abilities, Rao says. “This direct connection between brains — maybe that’s another way we can make a leap in our human evolution.”

Rao helped organize a three-way direct brain chat, in which three people sent and received messages using only their minds while playing a game similar to Tetris. Signals from the thoughts of two players’ brains moved over the internet and into the back of the receiver’s brain via a burst of magnetic stimulation designed to mimic information coming from the eyes.

Senders could transmit signals that told the receiver to rotate a piece, for instance, before dropping it down. Those results, published in 2019 in Scientific Reports, represent the first time multiple people have communicated directly with their brains.

Other projects have looped in animals, though no birds yet. In 2019, people took control of six awake rats’ brains, guiding the animals’ movements through mazes via thought. A well-trained rat cyborg could reach turning accuracy of nearly 100 percent, the researchers reported.

But those rats took commands from a person; they did not send information back. Continuous back-and-forth exchanges are a prerequisite for an accomplishment like Harry’s.

These types of experiments are happening too. A recent study linked three monkeys’ brains, allowing their minds to collectively move an avatar arm on a 3-D screen. Each monkey was in charge of moving in two of three dimensions; left or right, up or down, and near or far. Those overlapping yet distinct jobs caused the networked monkeys to flounder initially. But soon enough, their neural cooperation became seamless as they learned to move the avatar arm to be rewarded with a sip of juice.

With technological improvements, the variety of signals that can move between brains will increase. And with that, these brain collectives might be able to accomplish even more. “One brain can do only so much, but if you bring many brains together, directly connected in a network, it’s possible that they could create inventions that no single mind could think of by itself,” Rao says.

Groups of brains might be extra good at certain jobs. A collective of surgeons, for instance, could pool their expertise for a particularly difficult operation. A collective of fast-thinking pilots could drive a drone over hostile territory. A collective of intelligence experts could sift through murky espionage material.

Maybe one day, information from an animal’s brain might augment human brains — although it’s unlikely that the neural signals from a well-trained Clark’s nutcracker will be the top choice for a memory aid. Artificial intelligence, or even human intelligence, might make better memory partners. Whatever the source, these external “nodes” could ultimately expand and change a human brain’s connectome.

Still, connecting brains directly is fraught with ethical questions. One aspect, the idea of an “extended mind,” poses particularly wild conundrums, says bioethicist Elisabeth Hildt of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

“Part of me is connected and extended to this other human being,” she says. “Is this me? Is this someone else? Am I doing this myself?” she asks.

Some scientists think it’s too early to contemplate what it might feel like to have our minds dispersed across multiple brains (SN: 2/13/21, p. 24). Others disagree. “It may be too late if we wait until we understand the brain to study the ethics of brain interfacing,” Rao says. “The technology is already racing ahead.”

So feel free to mull over how it would feel to connect minds with a bird. If you were the human who could link to the mind of Harry the Clark’s nutcracker, for instance, perhaps you might start to dream of flying.

Science future: thoughts for sale

Javier had just been fired. “They’re done with me,” he told his coworker Marcus. “They’re done with the whole Signal program.”

Marcus shook his head. “I’m sorry, man.”

Javier went on: “It gets worse; they’re moving all of Signal’s data into the information market.”

The two were in the transportation business. Javier was the director of neural systems engagement for Zou, an on-demand ride hailing and courier system in Los Angeles. After the self-driving industry imploded because of too many accidents, Zou drove into L.A. with a promise of safety — so the company needed to make sure its drivers were the best.

That’s where Javier and his team came in. The ambitious idea of the Signal program was to incentivize drivers with cash, using their brain data, gathered by gray headsets.

Drivers with alert and focused brains earned automatic bonuses; a green power bar on-screen in the car showed minute-to-minute earnings. Drivers whose brains appeared sluggish or aggressive didn’t earn extra. Instead, they were warned. If the problem continued, they were fired.

This carrot-and-stick system, developed by Javier and his team, worked beautifully at first. But a few months in, accidents started creeping back up.

The problem, it turned out, was the brain itself: It changes. Human brains learn, find creative solutions, remake themselves. Incentivized to maintain a certain type of brain activity, drivers’ brains quickly learned to produce those signals — even if they didn’t correspond to better driving. Neural work-arounds sparked a race that Javier ultimately lost.

That failure was made worse by Zou’s latest plans. What had started as a driving experiment had morphed into an irresistible way for the company to make money. The plan was to gather and sell valuable data — information on how the drivers’ brains responded to a certain style of music, how excited drivers got when they saw a digital billboard for a vacation resort and how they reacted to a politician’s promises.

Zou was going to require employees to wear the headsets when they weren’t driving. The caps would collect data while the drivers ate, while they grocery shopped and while they talked with their kids, slurping up personal neural details and selling them to the highest bidders.

Of course, the employees could refuse. They could decide to take off the caps and quit. “But what kind of choice is that?” Javier asked. “Most of these drivers would open up their skulls for a paycheck.”

Marcus shook his head, and then asked, “How much extra are they going to pay?”

“Who knows,” Javier said. “Maybe nothing. Maybe they’ll just slip the data consent line into the standard contract.”

The two men looked at each other and shook their heads in unison. There wasn’t much left to say.

Reality check: thoughts for sale

Javier’s fictional program, Signal, was built with information gleaned externally from drivers’ brains. Today’s technology isn’t there yet. But it’s tiptoeing closer.

Some companies already sell brain monitoring systems made of electrodes that measure external brain waves with a method called electroencephalography. For now, these headsets are sold as wellness devices. For a few hundred dollars, you can own a headset that promises to fine-tune your meditation practice, help you make better decisions or even level up your golf game. EEG caps can measure alertness already; some controversial experiments have monitored schoolchildren as they listened to their teacher.

The claims by these companies are big, and they haven’t been proven to deliver. “It is unclear whether consumer EEG devices can reveal much of anything,” ethicist Anna Wexler of the University of Pennsylvania argued in a commentary in Nature Biotechnology in 2019. Still, improvements in these devices, and the algorithms that decode the signals they detect, may someday enable more sophisticated information to be reliably pulled from the brain.

Other types of technology, such as functional MRI scans, can pull more detailed information from the brain.

Complex visual scenes, including clips of movies that people were watching, can be extracted from brain scans. Psychologist Jack Gallant and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley built captivating visual scenes using data from people’s brains as they lay in an fMRI scanner. A big red bird swooped across the screen, elephants marched in a row and Steve Martin walked across the screen, all impressionistic versions of images pulled from people’s brain activity.

That work, published in 2011, foreshadowed ever more complex brain-reading tricks. More recently, researchers used fMRI signals to re-create faces that people were seeing.

Visual scenes are one thing; will our more nebulous thoughts, beliefs and memories ever be accessible? It’s not impossible. Take a study from Japan, published in 2013. Scientists identified the contents of three sleeping people’s dreams, using an fMRI machine. But re-creating those dreams required hours of someone telling a scientist about other dreams first. To get the data they wanted, scientists first needed to be invited into the dreamers’ minds, in a way. Those three people were each awakened over 200 times early in the experiments and asked to describe what they had been dreaming about.

More portable and more reliable ways to eavesdrop on the brain from the outside are moving forward fast, a swiftness that has prompted some ethicists, scientists and futurists to call for special protections of neural data. Debates over who can access our brain activity, and for what purposes, will only grow more intense as the technology improves.

Black holes sit on the cusp of the unknowable. Anything that crosses a black hole’s threshold is lost forever, trapped by an extreme gravitational pull. That enigmatic quality makes the behemoths an enticing subject, scientists explain in the new documentary Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know.

The film follows two teams working over the last several years to unveil the mystery-shrouded monstrosities. Scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope attempt to make the first image of a black hole’s shadow using a global network of telescopes. Meanwhile, a small group of theoretical physicists, anchored by Stephen Hawking — who was still alive when filming began — aim to solve a theoretical quandary called the black hole information paradox (SN: 5/16/14).

When big discoveries happen, the camera is right there — allowing us to thrill in the moment when Event Horizon Telescope scientists first lay eyes on a black hole’s visage. And we triumph as the team unveils the result in 2019, a now-familiar orange, ring-shaped image depicting the supermassive black hole in the center of galaxy M87 (SN: 4/10/19). Likewise, scenes where Hawking questions his collaborators as they explain chalkboards full of equations prove mesmerizing. Viewers witness brilliant minds playing off one another, struggling with mistakes and dead ends in their calculations, punctuated by occasional, groundbreaking progress.

Stunning cinematography and skillful editing lend energy to Black Holes, directed by Harvard physicist and historian Peter Galison and available on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and other on-demand platforms on March 2. When the Event Horizon Telescope team begins taking data, we’re treated to a crisp montage of telescopes around the world, all swiveling to catch a glimpse of the black hole. Later, bright sunbeams slice across an office floor while scientists muddle through calculations regarding the darkest objects of the cosmos. Such scenes are punctuated by delightfully strange black-and-white animations that evoke a pensiveness appropriate for contemplating cosmic oddities.

There’s drama too: Event Horizon Telescope’s scientists wrestle with misbehaving equipment and curse uncooperative weather. The theoretical physicists grapple with the immense complexity of the cosmos on slow, distracted walks in the forest.

Other research topics garner brief mentions, such as the study of gravitational waves from colliding black holes (SN: 1/21/21) and black hole analogs made using water vortices (SN 6/12/17). The film treats these varied efforts to study black holes independently; some viewers may wish the dots were better connected.

Still, Black Holes successfully leads viewers through a fascinating, understandable trek across the varied frontiers of black hole knowledge. As Harvard physicist Shep Doeleman of the Event Horizon Telescope team describes it in the film, “we are chasing down something that struggles with all of its might to be unseen.” Pulling us to the very rim of this fathomless abyss, Black Holes invites us to stand with scientists peering over the edge.

Gory Details
Erika Engelhaupt
National Geographic, $26

We tend to turn away, physically or metaphorically, from things we find unsavory: leggy insects, bodily fluids, conversations about death. But just because something is disgusting, morbid or taboo shouldn’t keep us from learning about it — and could even be a cue that we should, posits science journalist Erika Engelhaupt.

In Gory Details, Engelhaupt takes on a range of such topics, everything from which mammals are most likely to murder members of their own species and the spotty history of research on female genitalia to how fecal transplants work and the psychology of why we find clowns creepy. She often uses science, history or both to break down what gives a particular topic its taboo or ick status. How else are you going to stop chills from running up your spine while reading about a woman who pulled 14 tiny worms out of her eye other than by learning the story of parasitic survival that landed them there?

Regular Science News readers might recognize Engelhaupt’s name: She was an editor at the magazine from 2009 to 2014. While here, Gory Details was born as a blog and later moved to National Geographic. The book includes updated and expanded versions of some blog posts, as well as plenty of new material.

Science News caught up with Engelhaupt to talk about the book. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

SN: You’ve mentioned that when people learn your book title is Gory Details, they assume you write for kids.

Engelhaupt: Yes. At some point, people are expected to grow up and not be interested in gross things anymore, and I reject that. I think actually we all are interested in a wide variety of gross things. It’s a matter of how you frame it. We may love watching murder mysteries and true crime and CSI-type shows. We don’t necessarily think of ourselves as being morbid because of it. But when it comes to things like biology, anatomy and subjects that are taboo involving sex or death, we hold ourselves to a different standard. I want people to read this book and walk away feeling like, you know what? It’s OK to be curious about things that we have considered off-limits for polite conversation.

SN: Do you think you have a higher tolerance than most for “gross” topics?

Engelhaupt: There is a quiz that you can take to see how easily disgusted you are. I’m totally average. I think maybe that’s part of why I’m so interested in these topics, because they gross me out just as much as everyone else.

SN: You went to a conference on edible insects. This seemed like it was right at your limit of what you were willing to do in the name of Gory Details.

Engelhaupt: It was. I felt the need to go where all of the scientists would be and really learn why they think we’re all going to be eating more insects in 20 years. It was a challenge for me. There’s a little bit of a thrill in doing something like eating that first mealworm. You know it’s not actually going to hurt you, but it’s gross and it’s new and it is exciting. The biggest challenge was the silkworm pupa, which was large and segmented and just looked so … insecty.

SN: Do you have a favorite reporting field trip?

Engelhaupt: Probably the most fun travel I did for the book was going to biologist Rob Dunn’s lab at North Carolina State University to find my own face mites. There are two species of little eight-legged mites that live on all of our faces — and elsewhere on our bodies, by the way. Seeing something that was living in my pores squiggling around on the microscope slide — for me, there’s nothing more fun than that. I still keep pictures on my cell phone of my face mites so that I can show them to people.

SN: You write about “delusions of infestation,” where people believe their bodies are teeming with insects. I was struck by the stories of people with this condition, and that they seemed to have no other mental illness.

Engelhaupt: A delusion is just a fixed idea that’s incorrect. When you hear that someone is delusional, you might think they’re schizophrenic or psychotic. There can be cases where there’s overlap with mental illness, but a lot of cases start off in a normal way. A person feels an itch, there’s a real physical sensation. It’s not too hard to imagine they’d think something is crawling on them and that it could be insects. It becomes extremely important to the person to convince people that they’re right and not crazy. So the person gets deeper and deeper into [the delusion], and it becomes harder and harder to get them to accept treatment.

There are antipsychotic drugs that can help people let go of the idea and treatments that can solve underlying problems — skin problems, for example, or nerve problems that can cause the sensations. [Treatment with antipsychotics] makes it all sound very scary. That’s one reason this problem goes so unrecognized and untreated — because of the stigma around mental illness and because it seems like people must be crazy. Our squeamishness and fear of people who are experiencing this, our deep discomfort with it, has really created a trap for people.

SN: You also write about a lot of new scientific research. Any standout papers where you thought, I have to write about this?

Engelhaupt: A study where scientists fed different human bodily fluids to blowflies to see which ones the flies found tastiest. [The scientists] were looking at how flies might transfer human DNA picked up from bodily fluids to different parts of a crime scene. [DNA analysis] techniques are now so sensitive that we’re picking up DNA from fly poop. If the flies have previously eaten human blood or semen or saliva, there can be DNA from that person that gets pooped out by the fly. That [DNA] might get interpreted as blood spatter or get picked up incidentally at a crime scene and really confuse the situation. Who would have thought that you need to study fly poop to analyze DNA at a crime scene?

SN: I was sure you were going to say the paper on the calorie count of a human, from the chapter on cannibalism.

Engelhaupt: That’s one where it was a question I didn’t know I had until I saw that a scientist had answered it. And those are some of the kinds of things that I wanted to fill this book with: You didn’t know you wanted to know this, but I’m hoping that now you’re glad you do.

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Months before the first COVID-19 vaccine was even approved, wealthy nations scrambled to secure hundreds of millions of advance doses for their citizens. By the end of 2020, Canada bought up 338 million doses, enough to inoculate their population four times over. The United Kingdom snagged enough to cover a population three times its size. The United States reserved over 1.2 billion doses, and has already vaccinated about 14 percent of its residents.

It’s a drastically different story for less wealthy nations. More than 200 have yet to administer a single dose. Only 55 doses in total have been delivered among the 29 lowest-income countries, all in Guinea. Only a few sub-Saharan African countries have begun systematic immunization programs.

“The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure, and the price of this failure will be paid with the lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of the World Health Organization recently said.

COVAX, an international initiative tasked with ensuring more equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, aims to redress this imbalance by securing deals that send shots to low-income countries free of charge. Despite new pledges of support from some of the wealthiest nations, COVAX is off to a slow start. It’s first shipment of 600,000 shots was sent February 24, to Ghana. COVAX still needs nearly $23 billion to meet its goal of vaccinating 20 percent of participating countries by the end of the year.

Such stark inequities don’t just raise moral questions of fairness. With vaccine demand still vastly outstripping supply, lopsided distribution could also ultimately prolong the pandemic, fuel the evolution of new, potentially vaccine-evading variants, and drag down the economies of rich and poor — and vaccinated and unvaccinated — nations alike.

“I think the leaders of rich nations have done a very poor job explaining to their citizens why it’s so important that vaccines are distributed worldwide and not just within their own nation,” says Gavin Yamey, a global public health policy expert at Duke University. “No one is safe until all of us are safe, since an outbreak anywhere can become an outbreak everywhere.”

Vaccine inequity could breed vaccine-evading variants

Here’s why a new coronavirus outbreak anywhere can become an outbreak everywhere: Viruses mutate.

It’s normal and happens by chance as a virus replicates inside a host. Most mutations are harmless, or hurt the virus itself. But every so often, a tiny genetic tweak makes the virus better at infecting hosts or dodging their immune response. The more a virus spreads, the more opportunity that one (or more likely a handful) of these tweaks could birth a new, more threatening strain.

This is already happening. In December, scientists detected a new variant, dubbed B.1.1.7 in the United Kingdom. It soon became clear that it had acquired mutations that made it more infectious (SN: 1/27/21). In just a few months, that variant has circled the globe, popping up in more than 70 countries, including the United States.

Another variant first detected in South Africa is also more transmissible — and appears to be slightly less affected by existing vaccines (SN: 1/27/21). It too has spread worldwide. Variants detected in California and New York are now raising concern too. As long as widespread viral transmission continues, new variants will emerge.

“It’s uncertain at this point whether we’re going to have to continually chase this virus and develop more vaccines,” says William Moss, the executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The more the virus replicates, the more opportunity it has to evolve around existing vaccines or natural immune responses to older variants, Moss says. Large pockets of unvaccinated people can serve as incubators for new variants. The longer such pockets persist, the greater the chance of variants accumulating changes that make them more and more resistant to vaccines. Eventually, such variants might invade well-vaccinated countries that thought themselves safe.

Barely vaccinated populations might be especially fertile grounds for vaccine-evading variants, says Abraar Karan, an internal medicine physician at Harvard Medical School and Brigham Women’s Hospital in Boston. In a vaccinated individual, mutations that even slightly evade that induced immune response can get a foothold. Unless that variant completely evades vaccines, which is unlikely, its spread will be blunted by a well-vaccinated population. But if most of a region remains totally naïve to infection, that new variant could burn quickly through the largely unvaccinated population, fueling the changed virus’ spread to other regions.

In Israel, where cases have fallen after more than 40 percent of the population has received at least one vaccine dose, the health ministry has reported at least three cases of reinfection by the South African variant in non-vaccinated people. That’s a very small sample, but indicative of the threat posed by uneven vaccination rates globally.

“If we want to stop the spread we have to stop it everywhere, starting with the most vulnerable,” Karan says. “Otherwise we’re going to see continued outbreaks and suffering.”

“No economy is an island”

Protecting people from getting sick is obviously a big driver of the rush to vaccinate in wealthy nations, many of which have been hit hard by the virus. Vaccines are also seen as a way out of the largest global economic downturn since World War II, roughly a 4.4 percent dip. But an inequitable distribution of vaccines could imperil a robust and quick recovery, experts say.

If extended outbreaks, lockdowns, sickness and deaths continue in countries with less access to vaccines, all economies will suffer, says Selva Demiralp, an economist at Koç University in Istanbul. “No economy is an island,” she says, “and no economy will be fully recovered unless others are recovered, too.”

Extreme vaccine inequity could cost the global economy more than $9 trillion dollars in 2021, about half of which would come from rich nations, Demiralp and her colleagues reported January 25 in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. In that scenario, wealthy nations largely vaccinate their populations by midyear, but leave poorer nations out completely.

Everybody takes a hit thanks to the interconnectedness of the global economy. The production process to build a Volkswagen or iPhone, for instance, spans continents. Disruptions to one link of that supply chain, say steel manufacturing in Turkey, ripple throughout. Today’s marketplace is global, too: Diminished demand for goods in countries saddled with coronavirus restrictions will affect the bottom line of companies headquartered in wealthy nations. “As infections rise in a country, both supply and demand can decrease,” Demiralp says. 

She and her colleagues estimated these virus-induced fluctuations in supply and demand by combining a statistical model of how coronavirus spreads with vast amounts of economic data across 35 sectors in 65 countries. By tweaking the pace and extent of vaccination, the team estimated total costs to each country under different scenarios. The $9 trillion number represents extreme inequity. But less extreme gaps are still very expensive. 

If rich countries vaccinate their entire populations in four months, while the lowest-income countries vaccinate half their population by the end of 2021, global gross domestic product this year will fall by between $1.8 and $3.8 trillion, with rich countries losing about half of that, the team calculated. 

Those costs could be averted with a much smaller investment, on the order of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, in distributing vaccines globally. “It’s a no brainer,” Demiralp says. “It’s not an act of charity. It’s economic rationality.”

Evening the playing field

COVAX is trying to even the vaccine playing field — but with limited success so far. There are a lot of hurdles, from securing scarce doses to ensuring that countries have the infrastructure to handle them. That could mean equipping some countries with more ultracold refrigerators to store vaccines (SN: 11/20/20) to revamping mass vaccination programs designed for kids to work for adults too. “Equitable distribution will take a lot more than just securing vaccines,” says Angela Shen, a public health expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center.

Three global public health powerhouses lead the international initiative: the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. COVAX uses funds from governments and charitable organizations to buy up doses from pharmaceutical companies and distribute them to lower-income countries free of charge.

For starters, COVAX plans to distribute 330 million doses to lower-income countries in the first half of the year, enough to vaccinate, on average, 3.3 percent of each population. Meanwhile, by June many rich nations will be well on their way to vaccinating most of their populations.

All told, COVAX says it’s reserved 2.27 billion doses so far, enough to vaccinate 20 percent of the populations of 92 low-income countries by year’s end. Actually meeting that goal is contingent on raising $37 billion dollars, and COVAX is not even halfway there yet. On February 19, several countries including the United States and Germany pledged to contribute an additional $4.3 billion to the effort. Still, COVAX is nearly $23 billion short.

“Money is not the only challenge we face,” WHO’s Ghebreyesus said in a Feb. 22 news briefing. Deals between wealthy nations and pharmaceutical companies threaten to gobble up global vaccine supply, reducing COVAX’s access. “If there are no vaccines to buy, money is irrelevant.”

People getting vaccinated, in any country, is something to be celebrated, says Yamey, of Duke University, “but it should disturb us to know that low-risk people are going to get vaccinated in rich countries well ahead of high-risk people in poor countries.” A more equitable rollout, Yamey says, would prioritize healthcare workers and vulnerable people in all countries. “I don’t see that happening in any scenario unfortunately.”

Even if COVAX achieves its goal this year, these countries will be far from reaching herd immunity, the threshold at which enough people are immune to a pathogen to slow its spread (SN: 3/24/20). Estimates to reach that herd immunity range from 60 to 90 percent of a population.

“Many low-income nations won’t have widespread vaccination until 2023 or 2024, because they can’t get the doses,” Yamey says. “This inequity is due to hoarding of doses by rich nations, and that me-first, me-only approach ultimately goes against their long-term interests.”

Since December 2019, the sun has been moving into a busier part of its cycle, when increasingly intense pulses of energy can shoot out in all directions. Some of these large bursts of charged particles head right toward Earth. Without a good way to anticipate these solar storms, we’re vulnerable. A big one could take out a swath of our communication systems and power grids before we even knew what hit us.

A recent near miss occurred in the summer of 2012. A giant solar storm hurled a radiation-packed blob in Earth’s direction at more than 9 million kilometers per hour. The potentially debilitating burst quickly traversed the nearly 150 million kilometers toward our planet, and would have hit Earth had it come just a week earlier. Scientists learned about it after the fact, only because it struck a NASA satellite designed to watch for this kind of space weather.

That 2012 storm was the most intense researchers have measured since 1859. When a powerful storm hit the Northern Hemisphere in September of that year, people were not so lucky. Many telegraph systems throughout Europe and North America failed, and the electrified lines shocked some telegraph operators. It came to be known as the Carrington Event, named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed intensely bright patches of light in the sky and recorded what he saw.

The world has moved way beyond telegraph systems. A Carrington-level impact today would knock out satellites, disrupting GPS, mobile phone networks and internet connections. Banking systems, aviation, trains and traffic signals would take a hit as well. Damaged power grids would take months or more to repair.

Especially now, during a pandemic that has many of us relying on Zoom and other video-communications programs to work and attend school, it’s hard to imagine the widespread upheaval such an event would create. In a worst-case scenario conceived before the pandemic, researchers estimated the economic toll in the United States could reach trillions of dollars, according to a 2017 review in Risk Analysis.

To avoid such destruction, in October then-President Donald Trump signed a bill that will support research to produce better space weather forecasts and assess possible impacts, and enable better coordination among agencies like NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“We understand a little bit about how these solar storms form, but we can’t predict [them] well,” says atmospheric and space scientist Aaron Ridley of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Just as scientists know how to map the likely path of tornadoes and hurricanes, Ridley hopes to see the same capabilities for predicting space weather.

The ideal scenario is to get warnings well before a storm disables satellites or makes landfall, and possibly even before the sun sends charged particles in our direction. With advance warning, utilities and governments could power down the grids and move satellites out of harm’s way.

Ridley is part of a U.S. collaboration creating simulations of solar storms to help scientists quickly and accurately forecast where the storms will go, how intense they will be and when they might affect important satellites and power grids on Earth. Considering the havoc an extreme solar storm could wreak, many scientists and governments want to develop better forecasts as soon as possible.

Ebbs and flows

When scientists talk about space weather, they’re usually referring to two things: the solar wind, a constant stream of charged particles flowing away from the sun, and coronal mass ejections, huge outbursts of charged particles, or plasma, blown out from the sun’s outer layers (SN Online: 3/7/19). Some other phenomena, like high-energy particles called cosmic rays, also count as space weather, but they don’t cause much concern.

Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, the most threatening kind of solar storms, aren’t always harmful — they generate dazzling auroras near the poles, after all. But considering the risks of a storm shutting down key military and commercial satellites or harming the health of astronauts in orbit, it’s understandable that scientists and governments are concerned.

Astronomers have been peering at our solar companion for centuries. In the 17th century, Galileo was among the first to spy sunspots, slightly cooler areas on the sun’s surface with strong magnetic fields that are often a precursor to more intense solar activity. His successors later noticed that sunspots often produce bursts of radiation called solar flares. The complex, shifting magnetic field of the sun also sometimes makes filaments or loops of plasma thousands of kilometers across erupt from the sun’s outer layers. These kinds of solar eruptions can generate CMEs.

“The sun’s magnetic field lines can get complicated and twisted up like taffy in certain regions,” says Mary Hudson, a physicist at Dartmouth College. Those lines can break like a rubber band and launch a big chunk of corona into interplanetary space.

It was 19th century German astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwabe who realized that such solar activity ebbs and flows during 11-year cycles. This happens because the sun’s magnetic field completely flips every 11 years. The most recent sun cycle ended in December 2019, and we’re emerging from the nadir of sun activity while heading toward the maximum of cycle 25 (astronomers started numbering solar cycles in the 19th century). Solar storms, particularly the dangerous CMEs, are now becoming more frequent and intense, and should peak between 2024 and 2026.

Solar storms develop from the sun’s complex magnetic field. The sun rotates faster at its equator than at its poles, and since it’s not a solid sphere, its magnetic field constantly roils and swirls around. At the same time, heat from the sun’s interior rises to the surface, with charged particles bringing new magnetic fields with them. The most intense CMEs usually come from the most vigorous period in a particularly active solar cycle, but there’s a lot of variation. The 1859 CME originated from a fairly modest solar cycle, Hudson points out.

A CME has multiple components. If the CME is on a trajectory toward Earth, the first thing to arrive — just eight minutes after it leaves the sun — is the electromagnetic radiation, which moves at the speed of light. CMEs often produce a shock wave that accelerates electrons to extremely fast speeds, and those arrive within 20 minutes of the light. Such energetic particles can damage the electronics or solar cells of satellites in high orbits. Those particles could also harm any astronauts outside of Earth’s protective magnetic field, including any on the moon. A crew on board the International Space Station, inside Earth’s magnetic field, however, would most likely be safe.

But a CME’s biggest threat — its giant cloud of plasma, which can be millions of kilometers wide — typically takes between one and three days to reach our planet, depending on how fast the sun propelled the shotgun blast of particles toward us. Earth’s magnetic field, our first defense against space weather and space radiation, can protect us from only so much. Satellites and ground-based observations have shown that a CME’s charged particles interact with and distort the magnetic field. Those interactions can have two important effects: producing more intense electric currents in the upper atmosphere and shifting these stronger currents away from the poles to places with more people and more infrastructure, Ridley says. With an extremely powerful storm, it’s these potentially massive currents that put satellites and power grids at risk.

Anyone who depends on long-distance radio signals or telecommunications might have to do without them until the storm blows over and damaged satellites are repaired or replaced. A powerful storm can disturb airplanes in flight, too, as pilots lose contact with air traffic controllers. While these are temporary effects, typically lasting up to a day, impacts on the electrical grids could be worse.

A massive CME could suddenly and unexpectedly drive currents of kiloamps rather than the usual amps through power grid wires on Earth, overwhelming transformers and making them melt or explode. The entire province of Quebec, with nearly 7 million people, suffered a power blackout that lasted more than nine hours on March 13, 1989, thanks to such a CME during a particularly active solar cycle. The CME affected New England and New York, too. Had electricity grid operators known what was coming, they could have reduced power flow on lines and interconnections in the power grid and set up backup generators where needed.

Early warning

But planners need more of a heads-up than they get today. Perhaps within the next decade, improved computer modeling and new space weather monitoring capabilities will enable scientists to predict solar storms and their likely impacts more accurately and earlier, says physicist Thomas Berger, executive director of the Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Space meteorologists classify solar storms, based on disturbances to the Earth’s magnetic field, on a five-level scale, like hurricanes. But unlike those tropical storms, the likely arrival of a solar storm isn’t known with any precision using available satellites. For storms brewing on Earth, the National Weather Service has access to constantly updated data. But space weather data are too sparse to be very useful, with few storms to monitor and provide data.

Two U.S. satellites that monitor space weather are NASA’s ACE spacecraft, which dates from the 1990s and should continue to collect data for a few more years, and NOAA’s DSCOVR, which was designed at a similar time but not launched until 2015. Both orbit about 1.5 million kilometers above Earth — which seems far but is barely upstream of our planet from a solar storm’s perspective. The two satellites can detect and measure a solar storm only when its impact is imminent: 15 to 45 minutes away. That’s more akin to “nowcasting” than forecasting, offering little more than a warning to brace for impact.

“That’s one of the grand challenges of space weather: to predict the magnetic field of a CME long before it gets [here] so that you can prepare for the incoming storm,” Berger says. But aging satellites like SOHO, a satellite launched by NASA and the European Space Agency in 1995, plus ACE and DSCOVR monitor only a limited range of directions that don’t include the sun’s poles, leaving a big gap in observations, he says.

Ideally, scientists want to be able to forecast a solar storm before it’s blown out into space. That would give enough lead time — more than a day — for power grid operators to protect transformers from power surges, and satellites and astronauts could move out of harm’s way if possible.

That requires gathering more data, particularly from the sun’s outer layers, plus better estimating when a CME will burst forth and whether to expect it to arrive with a bang or a whimper. To aid such research, NOAA scientists will outfit their next space weather satellite, scheduled to launch in early 2025, with a coronagraph, an instrument used for studying the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, while blocking most of the sun’s light, which would otherwise blind its view.

A second major improvement could come just two years later, in 2027, with the launch of ESA’s Lagrange mission. It will be the first space weather mission to launch one of its spacecraft to a unique spot: 60 degrees behind Earth in its orbit around the sun. Once in position, the spacecraft will be able to see the surface of the sun from the side before the face of the sun has rotated and pointed in Earth’s direction, says Juha-Pekka Luntama, head of ESA’s Space Weather Office.

That way, Lagrange will be able to monitor an active, flaring area of the sun days earlier than other spacecraft, getting a fix on a new solar storm’s speed and direction sooner to allow scientists to make a more precise forecast. With these new satellites, there will be more spacecraft watching for incoming space weather from different spots, giving scientists more data to make forecasts.

Meanwhile, Berger, Ridley and colleagues are focused on developing better computer simulations and models of the behavior of the sun’s corona and the ramifications of CMEs on Earth. Ridley and his team are creating a new software platform that allows researchers anywhere to quickly update models of the upper atmosphere affected by space weather. Ridley’s group is also modeling how a CME shakes our planet’s magnetic field and releases charged particles toward the land below.

Berger also collaborates with other researchers on modeling and simulating Earth’s upper atmosphere to better predict how solar storms affect its density. When a storm hits, it compresses the magnetic field, which can change the density of the outer layers of Earth’s atmosphere and affect how much drag satellites have to battle to stay in orbit.

Satellite safety

There have been a few cases of satellites damaged by solar storms. The Japanese ADEOS-II satellite stopped functioning in 2003, following a period of intense outbursts of energy from the sun. And the Solar Maximum Mission satellite appeared to have been dragged into lower orbit — and eventually burned up in the atmosphere — following the same 1989 solar storm that left Quebec in the dark.

Satellites affected by solar storms could be at risk of crashing into each other or space debris, too. With mega-constellations of satellites like SpaceX’s being launched by the hundreds (SN: 3/28/20, p. 24), and with tens of thousands of satellites and bits of space flotsam already in crowded orbits, the risks are real of something drifting into the path of something else. Any space crash will surely create more space junk, too, tossing out debris that also puts spacecraft at risk.

These are all strong motivators for Ridley, Berger and colleagues to study how storm-driven drag works. The U.S. military tracks satellites and debris and predicts where they’ll likely be in the future, but all those calculations are worthless without knowing the effects of solar storms, says Boris Krämer, an aerospace engineer at the University of California, San Diego who collaborates with Ridley. “To put satellites on trajectories so that they avoid collisions, you have to know space weather,” Krämer says.

It takes time to create simulations estimating the drag on a single satellite. Current models run on powerful super-computers. But if a satellite needs to use its onboard computer to make those computations on the fly, researchers need to develop sufficiently accurate models that run much more quickly and with less energy.

New data and new models probably won’t be online in time for the upcoming solar storm season, but they should be in place for solar cycle 26 in the 2030s. Perhaps by then, scientists will be able to give earlier red alerts to warn of an incoming storm, giving more time to move satellites, buttress transformers and stave off the worst.

The goal of improving space weather forecasts has drawn broad federal government support and interest from industry, including Lockheed Martin, because of the threats to important satellites, including the 31 that constitute the U.S. GPS network.

The growing interest in space weather led to the 2020 law, known as the Promoting Research and Observations of Space Weather to Improve the Forecasting of Tomorrow Act, or PROSWIFT. And the National Science Foundation and NASA have thrown support behind space weather research programs like Berger’s and Ridley’s. For instance, Ridley, Krämer and their collaborators recently received $3.1 million in NSF grants to develop new space weather computer simulations and software, among other things.

Our reliance on technology in space comes with increasing vulnerabilities. Some space scientists speculate that we’ve failed to find alien civilizations because some of those civilizations were wiped out by the very active stars they orbit, which could strip a once-habitable world’s atmosphere and expose life on the surface to harmful stellar radiation and space weather. Our sun is not as dangerous as many other stars that have more frequent and intense magnetic activity, but it has the potential to be perilous to our way of life.

“Globally, we have to take space weather seriously and prepare ourselves. We don’t want to wake up one day, and all our infrastructure is down,” ESA’s Luntama says. With key satellites and power grids suddenly wrecked, we wouldn’t even be able to use our phones to call for help.

A drop in carbon dioxide levels may have helped sauropodomorphs, early relatives of the largest animal to ever walk the earth, migrate thousands of kilometers north past once-forbidding deserts around 214 million years ago.

Scientists pinpointed the timing of the dinosaurs’ journey from South America to Greenland by correlating rock layers with sauropodomorph fossils to changes in Earth’s magnetic field. Using that timeline, the team found that the creatures’ northward push coincides with a dramatic decrease in CO₂, which may have removed climate-related barriers, the team reports February 15 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The sauropodomorphs were a group of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs that included massive sauropods such as Seismosaurus as well as their smaller ancestors (SN: 11/17/20). About 230 million years ago, sauropodomorphs lived mainly in what is now northern Argentina and southern Brazil. But at some point, these early dinosaurs picked up and moved as far north as Greenland.

Exactly when they could have made that journey has been a puzzle, though. “In principle, you could’ve walked from where they were to the other hemisphere, which was something like 10,000 kilometers away,” says Dennis Kent, a geologist at Columbia University. Back then, Greenland and the Americas were smooshed together into the supercontinent Pangea. There were no oceans blocking the way, and mountains were easy to get around, he says. If the dinosaurs had walked at the slow pace of one to two kilometers per day, it would have taken them approximately 20 years to reach Greenland.

But during much of the Late Triassic Epoch, which spans 233 million to 215 million years ago, Earth’s carbon dioxide levels were incredibly high — as much as 4,000 parts per million. (In comparison, CO₂ levels currently are about 415 parts per million.) Climate simulations have suggested that level of CO₂ would have created hyper-arid deserts and severe climate fluctuations, which could have acted as a barrier to the giant beasts. With vast deserts stretching north and south of the equator, Kent says, there would have been few plants available for the herbivores to survive the journey north for much of that time period.

Previous estimates suggested that these dinosaurs migrated to Greenland around 225 million to 205 million years ago. To get a more precise date, Kent and his colleagues measured magnetic patterns in ancient rocks in South America, Arizona, New Jersey, Europe and Greenland — all locales where sauropodomorphs fossils have been discovered. These patterns record the orientation of Earth’s magnetic field at the time of the rock’s formation. By comparing those patterns with previously excavated rocks whose ages are known, the team found that sauropodomorphs showed up in Greenland around 214 million years ago.

That more precise date for the sauropodomorphs’ migration may explain why it took them so long to start the trek north — and how they survived journey: Earth’s climate was changing rapidly at that time.

Around the time that sauropodomorphs appeared in Greenland, carbon dioxide levels plummeted within a few million years to 2,000 parts per million, making the climate more travel-friendly to herbivores, the team reports. The reason for this drop in carbon dioxide — which appears in climate records from South America and Greenland — is unknown, but it allowed for an eventual migration northward.

“We have evidence for all of these events, but the confluence in timing is what is remarkable here,” says Morgan Schaller, a geochemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., who was not involved with this study. These new findings, he says, also help solve the mystery of why plant eaters stayed put during a time that meat eaters roamed freely.

“This study reminds us that we can’t understand evolution without understanding climate and environment,” says Steve Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, also not involved with the study. “Even the biggest and most awesome creatures that ever lived were still kept in check by the whims of climate change.”