Turning a bacterial defense mechanism into one of the most powerful tools in genetics has earned Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The award for these genetic scissors, called CRISPR/Cas 9, is “a fantastic prize,” Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said at an Oct. 7 news conference held in Stockholm by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to announce the prize. “The ability to cut the DNA where you want has revolutionized the life sciences. We can now easily edit genomes as desired — something that before was hard, or even impossible.”
“The genetic scissors were discovered just eight years ago, but have already benefited humankind greatly,” she said. “Only imagination sets the limits for what this chemical tool … can be used for in the future. Perhaps the dream of curing genetic diseases will come true.” She later amended the statement to say that ethics and law are also important to determine what can and should be done with the tool, as some human gene editing is extremely controversial.
Only five other women have ever won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. “I wish that this would provide a positive message specifically to the young … girls who would like to follow the path of science, and I think to show them that women in science can also be awarded prizes, but more importantly that women in science can also have an impact through the research that they are performing,” Charpentier said in response to a question during the news conference.
The two will split prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor, about $1.1 million.
The tool, a programmable molecular scissors known as CRISPR/Cas9, has been used by bacteria and archaea for millions to billions of years to fight viruses (SN: 4/5/17).
CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. In essence, these short, repeating bits of DNA sandwich bacteria’s version of the FBI’s most wanted list — invading viruses. Every time bacteria encounter a virus, they take a DNA mugshot of it and file it in between the repeats. The next time the bacteria encounters that virus, they make RNA copies of the mugshots. Those RNA photocopies then team up with another bit of RNA known as a trans-activating CRISPR RNA, or tracrRNA, to form an all-points bulletin known as a guide RNA. Guide RNAs shepherd the DNA-cutting enzyme Cas9 to the virus, where the enzyme chops and eliminates the threat.
Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Charpentier, now director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, turned CRISPR/Cas9 from a bacterial defense system into a gene editor. Their innovation was to fuse the mug shot RNA to the tracrRNA, creating a single guide RNA. And the researchers realized that the mugshots didn’t have to be molecular pictures of viruses. Instead, by replacing the mugshot with RNA that matches a gene, the scientists could direct Cas9 to snip that gene — or any gene, really.
These researchers and other scientists have taken these genetic scissors to the next step, using CRISPR/Cas9 to cut and edit genes in human cells. Scientists rave about how cheap, versatile and easy to use CRISPR is. Researchers have used it edit genes in a wide variety of animals, including dogs (SN: 8/30/18), mice (SN: 1/26/17), butterflies (SN: 8/24/16), cows (SN: 2/3/17), pigs (SN: 8/10/17), snails (SN: 5/14/19) and mosquitoes.
With CRISPR’s great power comes great controversy, Doudna warned in her 2017 book A Crack in Creation with coauthor Samuel Sternberg. While the gene editor might be used to stamp out invasive species and prevent mosquitoes from carrying disease, it might also drive entire species extinct or create ecological disasters. Already scientists have wiped out small populations of mosquitoes in the laboratory using a CRISPR-based molecular copy machine known as a gene drive (SN: 9/24/18).
Most controversially, a scientist in China edited genes in human embryos, producing twin baby girls in 2018 (SN: 11/28/18). Backlash against his actions was swift and vocal. But many people fear the door is already open to “designer babies,” health care inequalities and other abuses (SN: 12/17/18).
“This enormous power of this technology means that we need to use it with great care,” Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said at the news conference. “But it’s equally clear that this is a technology… that will provide humankind with great opportunities.”
More hopefully, clinical trials testing CRISPR/Cas9’s ability to treat cancer, sickle cell disease, beta-thalassemia and inherited blindness began in 2019 (SN: 8/14/19). If successful, CRISPR/Cas9 may provide therapies, or even cures, for previously untreatable genetic conditions.
CRISPR has also played a role in the coronavirus pandemic, with CRISPR-based diagnostic tests for COVID-19 (SN: 8/31/20) and therapies in development.
Nearly all scientific prizes for CRISPR/Cas9 have honored Doudna and Charpentier. Some prizes have also included Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who holds the patent on using the gene editor to make changes in eukaryotic cells, including human and animal cells. Many people thought that the prize would not honor work on CRISPR until the patent dispute was settled. (Zhang is a member of the board of trustees for the Society for Science & the Public, an educational nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that also publishes Science News. He is also an alumnus of the Society’s Regeneron Science Talent Search.)
Two other scientists, Rodolphe Barrangou of North Carolina State University in Raleigh and Philippe Horvath of DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences in Dangé-Saint-Romain, France, have also been honored for discoveries related to CRISPR. The duo discovered CRISPR’s natural role as a bacterial immune system while working with yogurt bacteria at the food ingredient company Danisco.
And two major prizes — the Warren Alpert Foundation prize and the Kavli prize for neuroscience — have honored Virginijus Šikšnys, a biochemist at Vilnius University in Lithuania. Šikšnys authored an independent paper describing the same innovation made by Doudna and Charpentier that was held up in the publishing process, and didn’t hit presses until three months after the UC Berkeley team’s report.
When asked if other scientists had been considered for the prize, Gustaffson said, “this is a question we never answer. We are just extremely happy for this year’s laureates. It’s a big field, and there’s a lot of good science being done.”
Staff writer Maria Temming contributed to this story.
Attacked from behind and at times dismembered, the fallen residents of an ancient Iberian village add to evidence that prehistoric Europe was a violent place.
Finding “partially burnt skeletons and scattered human bones with unhealed injuries caused by sharp weapons demonstrated that this was an extremely violent event,” says archaeologist Javier Ordoño Daubagna of Arkikus, an archaeological research company in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.
Ordoño Daubagna and colleagues examined nine adults, two adolescents, a young child and one infant who died sometime between 365 and 195 B.C., in the ancient village of La Hoya. One of the adults was decapitated in a single blow, the team found. And one of the adolescents, a female, had her arm cut off. The researchers found the arm bones nearly three meters away from the girl’s skeleton, with five copper-alloy bracelets still attached.
Cracks and flaking of the outer layers of some of the bones suggest that the victims were abandoned after they died, rather than buried, the report shows. Other people may have been trapped inside burning buildings — bone shrinkage and discoloration suggest that the remains were in a fire that reached 350° to 650° Celsius. The fact that the bones were only partially burned suggest that they were not scorched during cremation, a common ritual at the time, the researchers say.
“The nature of the injuries, the presence of women and young children as victims and the context of where the human remains were found on the site all indicated that this was not a battle between anything like matched forces,” says coauthor Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford. “This was not a battle between noble warriors.”
The study supports the idea that Iron Age societies on the Iberian Peninsula were fully capable of resorting to brutal violence as a means of settling disputes, the researchers argue. “We can conclude that the aim of the attackers was the total destruction of La Hoya, perhaps by a rival center for political and economic dominance in the area,” Ordoño Daubagna says.
In-depth accounts of similar attacks during the pre-Roman Iron Age are rare, but this sort of violence may have been more common than scientists have realized. During that time, “power was gained by violence and control over resources,” explains Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, an archaeologist at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden, who wasn’t involved in the study. If people think of the past as something peaceful and idealized, he says, “that needs to be revised.”
In the four days since revealing he had COVID-19, President Donald Trump has been treated with three experimental drugs to bring the infection under control: monoclonal antibodies, the antiviral remdesivir and the steroid dexamethasone.
Individually, all three treatments have shown promising results in clinical trials. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued emergency use authorization to give remdesivir to patients ill enough to require hospitalization. Several large studies have shown steroids can reduce the risk of death in critically ill patients. And biotechnology company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals just released preliminary antibody results on September 29 from an early-stage clinical trial with 275 COVID-19 patients suggesting a high-dose cocktail of lab-made immune proteins can help speed recovery.
But it’s unclear how the drugs might work when used together to treat patients, says Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious diseases physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Here’s what we know so far about the treatments used to treat the president.
How do the treatments work?
In a news release on October 2, the White House announced that Trump had received a single dose of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail shortly after his diagnosis. (Regeneron, in Tarrytown, N.Y, is a major financial supporter of Society for Science & the Public, which publishes Science News.)
That cocktail includes a pair of monoclonal antibodies that each target a different part of the coronavirus’s spike protein. The virus uses the spike protein to pick a cellular lock, called ACE2, to break into cells and begin replicating. By binding to the spike, antibodies can neutralize the virus and curb the infection. Such monoclonal antibodies have been tested early in infection, in people who are not severely ill with COVID-19.
Later that day, physicians moved Trump to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he began a five-day course of remdesivir, a drug developed by biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, which is based in Foster City, Calif. Remdesivir, which is given intravenously, mimics a building block of the coronavirus’s genetic material. It tricks the virus into incorporating the faux compound into the virus’s genetic blueprint, instead of incorporating a real building block, bringing viral replication to a halt.
Then, on October 3, the president also received dexamethasone, his medical team said in a news conference on October 4. The steroid, administered through a muscle injection or intravenously, is typically reserved for patients who require supplemental oxygen or are on a ventilator. The drug suppresses inflammation, an immune response that is behind some severe COVID-19 cases.
What do the data say so far about these drugs?
Some monoclonal antibodies, such as those from Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Regeneron have shown early hints of success, although the results are still preliminary (SN 9/22/20). The treatments appear to reduce levels of the virus in the body.
Such antibodies are likely best used early on, while the virus is still replicating in a patient’s body, Gandhi says.
Later during disease, viral replication wanes but severely ill patients may have massive amounts of inflammation from an overactive immune response. Without lots of virus circulating in the body, antibodies that dampen viral growth are less effective at making patients better.
So far, studies suggest that remdesivir and dexamethasone can help people who end up in the hospital, Gandhi says. Remdesivir may be best used early, before patients require hospital care, but it hasn’t yet been tested in mildly ill patients. The company is working on developing an inhaled version that could be administered earlier in an infection outside of a hospital setting.
Remdesivir was the first drug shown to curb viral replication and potentially speed recovery in hospitalized COVID-19 patients (SN: 4/29/20). Dexamethasone has been used for decades to treat a variety of ailments and was the first drug shown to reduce COVID-19 deaths among people who need supplemental oxygen (SN: 6/16/20). In September, the World Health Organization confirmed that steroids are beneficial for COVID-19 patients — specifically those who were severely or critically ill (SN: 9/2/20).
The WHO and U.S. National Institutes of Health do not recommend steroid use in people who are less sick, as the drugs can suppress their immune system’s response to the coronavirus and might make the disease worse, says Gandhi, who has helped write COVID-19 treatment guidelines for NIH as well as the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Trump received remdesivir and dexamethasone within a day or two, respectively, of his diagnosis. Such treatment may be a sign that Trump’s condition is more severe than reported, or it could be a preemptive measure to ensure his symptoms don’t become severe. Initially, his symptoms were described as mild, but his physicians have said that since his diagnosis, Trump had a high fever and has received supplemental oxygen when his blood oxygen level dipped.
What we know about how the drugs might work when combined?
“We don’t yet know how they work together,” Gandhi says.
Researchers have made strides in uncovering potential treatments, and trials for a wide variety of drugs are ongoing. But, so far, the use of remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies and dexamethasone in combination hasn’t been studied. Some efforts are under way to find answers. Participants in the treatment arm of one clinical trial for a monoclonal antibody, for instance, are receiving both the antibody and remdesivir to compare their use together with remdesivir alone.
“There are theoretical reasons to think that it would make sense to combine them,” Gandhi says. For instance, an antiviral drug like remdesivir should “shut down virus replication and then dexamethasone would mop up the inflammation.”
Inflammation is part of the body’s natural response to viral infection and normal levels help clear the virus from the body. If a patient is suffering from high amounts of inflammation and requires steroid treatments to suppress the response, it might be beneficial to have an antiviral on hand to help snuff out the infection.
Because antivirals target the virus while the steroids dampen a potentially harmful immune response, such combination therapies shouldn’t overstimulate a patient’s immune system, he says. It’s unknown whether using the drugs together might help or hinder their effectiveness.
“Sometimes we in medicine end up making decisions without perfect data,” Gandhi says. “Unfortunately, that’s the situation [in a pandemic], and then we use our best judgment.”
That judgment is under a bright spotlight thanks to Trump’s high profile. Saying that Trump “may not be entirely out of the woods yet,” White House physician Sean Conley on October 5 reported in a news conference that the president’s condition had improved enough that he was cleared to leave the hospital and return to the White House. “If we can get through [another week] to Monday with him remaining the same — or improving, better yet — then we will all take the final deep sigh of relief.”
Three virologists have won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus.
Harvey Alter, of the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., Michael Houghton, who is now at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and Charles Rice now of The Rockefeller University in New York City will split the prize of 10 million Swedish kronor, or more than $1.1 million, the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute announced October 5.
About 71 million people worldwide have chronic hepatitis C infections. An estimated 400,000 people die each year of complications from the disease, which include cirrhosis and liver cancer. Today, the major way people get infected is through contaminated needles used for injecting intravenous drugs, but when the researchers made their discoveries in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, blood transfusions were an important source of hepatitis C infection.
“This is a bit overdue,” says Dennis Brown, chief science officer of the American Physiological Society. It often takes decades before scientific achievements are recognized by the Nobel committee. One reason for the recognition this year may be COVID-19, Brown says. “This keeps virology and viruses in the public eye,” he says. “It might be a push to put science at the forefront, to say when we put money into this and when we have well-funded people working on these viruses, we can actually do something about them.”
The trio of winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine — Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice (from left) — all played a role in discovering the hepatitis C virus, which can cause a silent but ultimately deadly disease. “It’s hard to find something that is of such benefit to mankind,” Thomas Perlmann, Secretary General for the Nobel Committee, said. The discovery “has led to improvements for millions of people around the world.” (from left) NIH History Office/Flickr; Univ. of Alberta; The Rockefeller Univ.
Alter worked at a large blood bank at NIH in the 1960s when hepatitis B was discovered. (That discovery won the 1976 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine (SN: 10/23/76).) Blood could be screened so that people wouldn’t get that virus from a transfusion, but patients were still developing hepatitis. Alter and colleagues showed in the mid- and late 1970s that a new virus, dubbed “non-A, non-B” was causing the infection, and that the virus could be used to transmit the disease to chimpanzees (SN: 4/1/78).
Just over a decade later, Houghton, working at the pharmaceutical company Chiron Corp. (now part of Novartis), developed a way to pull fragments of the virus’s genetic material from the blood of infected chimpanzees and developed a test to screen out hepatitis C-infected blood (SN: 5/14/88) . It took so long to isolate the virus’s genetic material because Houghton “had to wait until the technology was available,” Brown says.
The blood test Houghton and colleagues developed was used to screen blood all around the world and dramatically decreased hepatitis C infections, said Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam, an immunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who described the laureates’ contributions. Before then, “it was a bit like Russian roulette to get a blood transfusion” said Nils-Göran Larsson, a member of the selection committee.
But a question still remained about whether the hepatitis C virus alone was responsible for the infection. Rice and colleagues working at Washington University in St. Louis stitched together genetic fragments of the virus pulled from the blood of infected chimpanzees into a working virus and demonstrated that it could cause hepatitis in animals. “This provided conclusive evidence that the cloned hepatitis C alone could cause the disease,” Karlsson Hedestam said.
Thomas Perlmann, secretary general of the Nobel Assembly, had to try several times before he reached Alter and Rice to give them news of their win. Alter said he got up angrily the third time his phone rang before 5 a.m. EDT, but his anger soon turned to shock. “It’s otherworldly. It’s something you don’t think will ever happen, and sometimes don’t think you deserve to happen. And then it happens,” he said in an interview posted at nobelprize.org. “In this crazy COVID year, where everything is upside down, this is a nice upside down for me.”
With several vaccines against COVID-19 in late-phase testing, the business of measuring efficacy is front and center.
Determining the efficacy, or how well a vaccine works in a randomized, controlled trial, gives a sense of how much a vaccine could help alleviate the suffering caused by COVID-19. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends vaccines tested against COVID-19 reach an efficacy of 50 percent, at minimum. That means at least a 50 percent reduction in cases of COVID-19 disease in those who are vaccinated compared with those who receive the placebo.
Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca have each begun phase III trials of their vaccines in the United States. These late-phase trials, which will each assess safety and efficacy in tens of thousands of people, randomly assign some participants to receive vaccinations and others a placebo. The companies and the U.S. government, working together as part of Operation Warp Speed, have set a goal of having initial doses of a vaccine available by January 2021 (SN: 7/10/20). It won’t be clear how well any of these vaccines do their job until the companies report full results from those trials; some preliminary results may come out as early as October.
The FDA setting a minimum recommendation for efficacy doesn’t mean vaccines couldn’t perform better. The benchmark is also a reminder that COVID-19 vaccine development is in its early days. If the first vaccines made available only meet the minimum, they may be replaced by others that prove to protect more people. But with more than 1 million deaths from COVID-19 worldwide — and U.S. deaths surpassing 200,000 — the urgency in finding a vaccine that safely helps at least some people is at the forefront.
“You want to set the bar [for efficacy] high enough so that it is clinically and epidemiologically significant, but low enough that a ‘good enough’ vaccine can be licensed until something better comes along,” says Kawsar Talaat, a vaccine researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The World Health Organization has also set a minimum target of 50 percent efficacy for vaccines tested against COVID-19, but its “preferred efficacy” is at least 70 percent.
Efficacy specifically applies to how a vaccine works in a clinical trial. For the four vaccine candidates now in phase III trials in the United States, the primary goal is not necessarily to stop an infection but to prevent a person from experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 or, in Johnson & Johnson’s case, to guard against moderate to severe illness. Researchers will count cases of symptomatic COVID-19 in the vaccinated group and in the placebo group (who get injections of saline, for example) and calculate how much of a reduction there was with vaccination.
“At least with the first generation of vaccines,” Talaat says, “what we’re really trying to do is prevent severe disease and hospitalization and death.”
A vaccine that prevents people from developing symptoms may not stop them from becoming infected and passing the virus to others. If such a vaccine gets approved, what the vaccine does and doesn’t do would need to be communicated very clearly, says Maria Bottazzi, a vaccinologist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. People would still need to wear masks and practice social distancing to help keep the virus from spreading, she says.
The efficacy results won’t be the final word on how effective the vaccine is in the real world. That’s one reason “why it’s always a good idea to have a more diverse population in your trials,” says Saad Omer, a vaccine researcher at Yale University. That way, researchers can gather data on how the vaccine works for different people in a variety of scenarios.
Studies of other vaccines in which a trial took place in different locations have reported different results based on the incidence of disease in those areas; some vaccines haven’t worked as well in populations where the risk of exposure is higher. In this pandemic, Black and Latino Americans are disproportionately represented in the essential jobs that can’t be done at home, putting them at risk for more exposures to the coronavirus (SN: 7/2/20).
A person’s age also affects how well a vaccine will work. Our immune system “ages as we age too,” says Bottazzi. When older adults get the flu vaccine, for example, the shot doesn’t elicit as strong an immune response as it does in younger adults. In the United States, adults ages 65 and older can get specially formulated flu vaccines that create a stronger immune response and better protection for this age group.
For the COVID-19 vaccine trials, the FDA has strongly encouraged “enrollment of populations most affected by COVID-19, specifically racial and ethnic minorities.” The agency also states that the phase III trials should include enough older adults and people with certain underlying medical conditions, two groups at increased risk for COVID-19, to be able to evaluate efficacy for them.
How well the first COVID-19 vaccines work, and for whom, will influence who is initially prioritized to receive the vaccine. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issues guidance on the use of vaccines in the general population. To recommend a COVID-19 vaccine for older adults, for example, there has to be data to show that it works for them.
There are other COVID-19 vaccines in development and testing; some aren’t very far behind the front runners. Even if one or more of the vaccines now in phase III trials gets the green light, “the story wouldn’t be over,” says Omer. “It would be the end of the beginning.”
Vaccine matchup
The next testing hurdle for the initial COVID-19 vaccines in development is to determine efficacy, or how they perform in a clinical trial. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends COVID-19 vaccines have an efficacy — measured by the reduction in cases of COVID-19 disease among those vaccinated versus those not — of at least 50 percent. How a vaccine performs once it’s used in the wider world is called effectiveness. See how the minimum goal for a COVID-19 vaccine stacks up against some other common vaccines.
Vaccine
Disease
How well it works
Shingrix vaccine
Shingles
97 percent overall efficacy in adults 50 and older; 90 percent efficacy for those 70 and older
Seasonal flu vaccine
Flu
Typically 30–60 percent effective, depending on the year and how well it matches with circulating flu viruses
Inactivated polio vaccine
Polio
90 percent effective or more with two doses; 99–100 percent effective with three doses
COVID-19 vaccine
COVID-19
FDA recommends a minimum of 50 percent efficacy, could be higher
Shingrix vaccine
Disease: Shingles How well it works: 97 percent overall efficacy in adults 50 and older; 90 percent efficacy for those 70 and older
Seasonal flu vaccine
Disease: Flu How well it works: Typically 30–60 percent effective, depending on the year and how well it matches with circulating flu viruses
Inactivated polio vaccine
Disease: Polio How well it works: 90 percent effective or more with two doses; 99–100 percent effective with three doses
COVID-19 vaccine
Disease: COVID-19 How well it works: FDA recommends a minimum of 50 percent efficacy, could be higher
“At the scale of the picture, both planets — massive as they are — should appear as point sources, so I assume their spherical appearance is due to the light collection method for this direct imaging,” reader Jean Asselin wrote.
Asselin is correct that the system is so far away that scientists cannot physically resolve any of the planets, says Alexander Bohn, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Both of the planets have no spatial size as seen from Earth. “That both have a physical diameter in the image is just caused by the optical response of an imaging device to a point source,” Bohn says. “If you image the night sky with your smartphone camera, the stars also have a finite size of pixels in your image, even though they are point sources for both you and your smartphone.”
Webicillin?
Some spider webs are coated in neurotoxins that may paralyze prey, Christie Wilcox reported in “Orb weavers may spin poisonous webs” (SN: 8/29/20, p. 18).
The story reminded reader Renata Riegler of a bit of medical folklore: Spider webs were said to be used to dress wounds. “The paralyzing or antimicrobial properties … could have helped the healing,” Riegler wrote.
Spider webs may have been used for centuries to dress wounds. The practice even is mentioned in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb: If I cut my finger, I shall make bold of you.” Spider silk is coated with chemicals that might promote blood clotting, prevent infection and speed healing, though scientific evidence for these properties is sparse, says associate editor Cassie Martin. Today, engineers are investigating spider silk as a drug delivery method and as scaffolding for tissue repair, she says.
Beetlemania
A water beetle eaten by a pond frog scurried through the frog’s digestive tract and emerged out the backside unscathed, Jonathan Lambert reported in “Eaten beetle exits the other end alive” (SN: 8/29/20, p. 18). The story amazed readers on Twitter. @JoePoutous likened the beetle’s journey to the tunnel of terror scene in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. @Rogie_The_Medic suggested a new name for the insect: fecal walking beetle.
One of the many joys of being editor in chief of Science News is learning about remarkable work being done by younger scientists. This year’s SN 10: Scientists to Watch honorees, who are profiled in this issue, are tackling some of the biggest challenges facing our world.
The search for the next SN 10 class starts in early January, when we contact Nobel Prize winners, members of the National Academy of Sciences and previous SN 10 honorees and ask for nominations. With those recommendations, we do our own research, checking out scientists’ CVs, publications and websites.
That portfolio then goes to Science News writers who cover those beats. We ask our writers to help us narrow down a very long list of people, all of whom are doing significant science and worthy of recognition. The aim is to find people who are making important discoveries, approaching a big problem with novel insights or shaking up their field.
I get to join in the next phase, when a small group of editors makes the final very difficult decisions. Once we’ve chosen the 10 finalists and double-checked their eligibility, we assign reporters to write short profiles. That’s no easy task; these researchers are so interesting we could write a very long story on each of them. But our goal is to offer a lively introduction, rather than a tome. We still take pains to put each scientist’s work in context. “The ‘why’ is interesting,” says Elizabeth Quill, Science News’ special projects editor and leader of this effort. “Why something as seemingly simple as the size of the proton is hard to know is a fascinating concept.”
I loved learning about Phiala Shanahan, a 29-year-old theoretical physicist at MIT who was shocked to discover while a graduate student that scientists disagreed on the size of the proton. That drove her to become adept at calculating the influence of gluons, which help keep protons intact. I’m inspired by Zhongwen Zhan, a 33-year-old seismologist at Caltech who wants to put fiber-optic cables to work as an earthquake early warning system. And since I have relatives in Oregon struggling with terrible air pollution caused by wildfires, I’m grateful for Emily Fischer, a 39-year-old atmospheric chemist at Colorado State University who built a collaborative network of researchers to study the enigmatic components in wildfire smoke, which are surprisingly not well known. It’s an urgent mission at a time when the western United States is contending with massive fires and choking smoke. “There’s so much science behind what people are experiencing in these devastating circumstances,” Quill says.
These researchers also have interests that go beyond the lab bench. Fischer, for one, has built a network to mentor undergraduate women in the geosciences. The program reaches more than 300 women at institutions across the United States. She encourages her own mentees to go after big, bold questions. “It’s OK to be wrong, and it’s OK to take risks,” she told staff writer Jonathan Lambert.
We hope you’ll enjoy getting acquainted with these remarkable young scientists and following their exploits in the years to come. I expect big things from them.
Some people’s genetic inheritance from Neandertals may raise their risk of developing severe COVID-19.
A stretch of DNA on human chromosome 3 was previously found to be associated with an increased risk of developing severe disease from coronavirus infection and of being hospitalized. Some genetic heirlooms passed down after humans interbred with Neandertals more than 50,000 years ago are known to affect immune system function and other aspects of human health even today (SN: 2/11/16). So researchers decided to see whether Neandertals and other extinct human cousins called Denisovans also share the risky region.
“I fell off my chair. It was really a surprise to see that the genetic variants were exactly the same as Neandertals’,” says evolutionary geneticist Hugo Zeberg of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Zeberg and his Max Planck colleague Svante Pääbo report the findings September 30 in Nature.
About half of people whose ancestors hail from South Asia — particularly Bangladesh — and about 16 percent of people in Europe today carry this bit of Neandertal legacy, the new study finds.
The risky DNA was identified as a COVID-19 danger zone in genome-wide association studies, or GWAS, which use statistical methods to find genetic variants that show up more often in people with a particular disease than in those without the disease. In this case, the comparison was between people who have milder forms of COVID-19 and people who required hospitalization.
This stretch on chromosome 3 contains multiple genetic variants that are almost always inherited together, forming a block known as a haplotype. Those variants aren’t necessarily the genetic tweaks that lead to more severe disease, but they flag that one or more genes in the region might be responsible for increasing susceptibility to the coronavirus. The researchers are working to figure out which genes in the region might be contributing to susceptibility, Zeberg says.
Of 13 genetic variants that make up the risky haplotype, 11 were found in the DNA of a 50,000 year-old Neandertal from Vindija Cave in Croatia (SN: 10/10/17), and three were shared with two Neandertals from the Altai mountains in Russia. Denisovans, on the other hand, didn’t carry these variants.
Although most non-Africans carry some Neandertal DNA as a relic of ancient interbreeding, inheritance of the COVID-19 susceptibility haplotype was patchy. The haplotype didn’t get passed down in East Asia, but people of South Asian ancestry were more likely to carry the Neandertal legacy. About 63 percent of people in Bangladesh have at least one copy of the disease-associated haplotype, and 13 percent have two copies (one from their mother and one from their father). For them, the Neandertal DNA might be partially responsible for increased mortality from a coronavirus infection. People of Bangladeshi origin living in the United Kingdom, for instance, are twice as likely to die of COVID-19 as the general population.
That patchwork inheritance pattern may indicate that different evolutionary pressures were at work during the haplotype’s history, says Tony Capra, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s an important lesson about genetic variation; what’s good in one place can be bad in another place.”
In Bangladesh, the haplotype may have given people an evolutionary advantage in fighting off other pathogens, such as cholera, allowing it to increase in frequency, Zeberg speculates. In East Asia, it might have been an evolutionary disadvantage when dealing with other illnesses, leading to its decline.
The results don’t mean that carrying Neandertal DNA will cause people to become severely ill — nor that not having it will protect people. East Asians generally have more Neandertal DNA than other groups (SN: 2/12/15), but didn’t inherit this risky heirloom. Still, thousands of people in China and other parts of East Asia have died of COVID-19. On the other hand, people of African descent have little to no Neandertal DNA, but Black Americans are among those at highest risk of dying of COVID-19, often for reasons that may have nothing to do with their genes (SN: 5/10/20).
Capra stresses that “with COVID-19, there’s a genetic component that is important, but social and other environmental factors are so much more important in determining risk and severity.” For instance, one of the biggest risk factors is age, with young children at the least risk and elderly people far more likely to be hospitalized or die when they contract COVID-19.
Some snakes eat toads by politely swallowing the creatures whole. Others saw a hole in a toad’s abdomen with their teeth, shove their heads in and gorge on organs and tissues — while the amphibian is still alive.
“Toads don’t have the same feelings and can’t sense pain in the same way as we can,” says Henrik Bringsøe, an amateur herpetologist who lives in Køge, Denmark. “But still, it must be the most horrible way of dying.”
In a new study, published September 11 in Herpetozoa, Bringsøe and his Thailand-based colleagues document three such attacks on toads by small-banded kukri snakes (Oligodon fasciolatus). It’s the first time that researchers have observed this behavior in snakes, though animals like crows or raccoons eat some toads in a similar fashion.
Small-banded kukri snakes are known to use their teeth — which resemble curved kukri knives used by Nepalese Gurkha soldiers — to tear into eggs. And like most snakes, O. fasciolatus also feed by swallowing their meals whole. The snakes may use the newly described method, the researchers say, to best evade a toxin that the Asian black-spotted toad (Duttaphrynus melanostictus) secretes from glands on its neck and back (SN: 6/19/18).
One Asian black-spotted toad was already dead when the children of coauthors Winai and Maneerat Suthanthangjai — both agricultural researchers at Loei Rajabhat University in Loei, Thailand — stumbled upon a snake feasting on its innards near the city. But the whole area was bloody, and the snake had clearly dragged its prey around. It was clear “that it had been a true battlefield,” Bringsøe says.
Two other episodes at a nearby pond involved living Asian black-spotted toads. One fight that Winai watched lasted almost three hours, as a snake battled with the toad’s toxic defenses before finally winning. A kukri snake saws into its prey using its teeth like a steak knife, he says, “slowing cutting back and forth until it can put its head in” and eat the organs.
The reptiles may attack in this manner to help them dodge a toad’s poison, Bringsøe says, but it also may be a way for the snakes to eat prey that is too large to swallow. A fourth snake was spotted by coauthor Kanjana Nimnuam, a colleague of the Suthanthangjais, swallowing a smaller black-spotted toad whole.
In the midst of a pandemic that has brought so much worry and loss, it’s natural to want to help — to do some small part to solve a problem, to counter pain, or to, importantly, remind others that there is beauty and wonder in the world. Scientists have long been doing just that. Many are chasing answers to the myriad challenges that people face every day, and revealing the rewards in the pursuit of knowledge itself. It’s in that spirit that we present this year’s SN 10: Scientists to Watch.
Others are trying to grasp how weird and wonderful the natural world is — from exploring how many supermassive black holes are out there in space to understanding the minuscule genetic details that drive evolution. For instance, SaraH Zanders, one of this year’s SN 10, is unveiling the drama that unfolds when life divvies up its genetic material.
A couple of the scientists on this year’s list have also taken steps to support people from groups that are underrepresented in the sciences. These researchers see how science benefits when people from diverse backgrounds contribute to the pursuit of answers.
All of this year’s honorees are age 40 and under, and all were nominated by Nobel laureates, recently elected members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences or previous SN 10 scientists. The world feels very different than it did at the start of 2020, when we first put out our call for SN 10 nominations, but the passion these scientists have for their work endures. The curiosity, creativity and drive of this crew offers hope that we can overcome some of our biggest challenges.
Though it often takes time, out of crisis comes action. Also out of crisis comes a renewed appreciation for small pleasures that give life meaning. These researchers find joy in the search for scientific answers. Here’s how Zanders describes what motivates her work: “It’s just I like to solve puzzles.” — Elizabeth Quill
Affiliation: Dartmouth College Hometown: Dhaka, Bangladesh Favorite black hole: Cygnus X-1
Standout research
Tonima Tasnim Ananna is bringing the heaviest black holes out of hiding. She has drawn the most complete picture yet of black holes across the universe — where they are, how they grow and how they affect their environments. And she did it with the help of artificial intelligence.
As far as astronomers can tell, nearly every galaxy stows a black hole at its center, weighing millions or billions of times the mass of the sun. Though these supermassive black holes can heat surrounding material until it glows brighter than all the galaxy’s stars combined, the light can be concealed by gas and dust also drawn in by the black hole’s pull. High-energy X-rays cut through that dusty veil. So for her Ph.D., completed in 2019, Ananna gathered surveys from four X-ray telescopes, more datasets than any previous study had used. Her goal was to create a model of how black holes grow and change across cosmic history. “It was supposed to be a short paper,” Ananna says. But models that explained one or a few of the datasets didn’t work for the full sample. “It stumped us for some time.”
To break the gridlock, she developed a neural network, a type of artificial intelligence, to find a description of the black hole population that explained what all the observatories saw. “She just went off and taught herself machine learning,” says astrophysicist Meg Urry of Yale University, Ananna’s Ph.D. adviser. “She doesn’t say, ‘Oh, I can’t do this.’ She just figures out a way to learn it and do it.” One early result of the model suggests that there are many more active black holes out there than previously realized.
Big goal
Black holes could be gobbling down gas as fast as theoretically possible.
Galaxies live and die by their black holes. “When a black hole puts out energy into the galaxy, it can cause stars to form,” Ananna says. “Or it could blow gas away,” shutting down star formation and stunting the galaxy’s growth (SN: 3/31/20). So understanding black holes is key to understanding how cosmic structures — everything from galaxy clusters down to planets and perhaps even life — came to be. Ananna’s model is built on data describing black holes at different cosmic distances. Because looking far in space is like looking back in time, the model shows how black holes grow and change over time. It could also help figure out how efficiently black holes eat. Early hints suggest black holes could be gobbling down gas as fast as theoretically possible, which may help explain how some got so big so fast (SN: 3/16/18).
Inspiration
When Ananna was a 5-year-old in Dhaka, Bangladesh, her mother told her about the Pathfinder spacecraft landing on Mars. Her mother was a homemaker, she says, but was curious about science and encouraged Ananna’s curiosity, too. “That’s when I realized there were other worlds,” she says. “That’s when I wanted to study astronomy.” There were not a lot of opportunities to study space in Bangladesh, so she came to the United States for undergrad, attending Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She chose an all-women’s school not known for a lot of drinking to reassure her parents that she was not “going abroad to party.” Although Ananna intended to keep her head down and study, she was surprised by the social opportunities she found. “The women at Bryn Mawr were fiercely feminist, articulate, opinionated and independent,” she says. “It really helped me grow a lot.” Traveling for internships at NASA and CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, and a year at the University of Cambridge, boosted her confidence. (She did end up going to some parties — “no alcohol for me, though.”)
Now, Ananna is giving back. She cofounded Wi-STEM (pronounced “wisdom”), a mentorship network for girls and young women who are interested in science. She and four other Bangladeshi scientists who studied in the United States mentor a group of 20 female high school and college students in Bangladesh, helping them find paths to pursue science. — Lisa Grossman
Affiliation: Texas Tech University Hometown: Rome, Italy Favorite telescope: Very Large Array, New Mexico
Standout research
On September 3, 2017, Alessandra Corsi finally saw what she had been waiting for since mid-August: a small dot in her telescope images that was the radio afterglow of a neutron star collision. That stellar clash, discovered by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory team, or LIGO, which included Corsi, was the first direct sighting of a neutron star collision (SN: 10/16/17). The event, dubbed GW170817, was also the first of any kind seen in both gravitational waves and light waves.
Telescopes around the world spotted all kinds of light from the crash site, but one particular kind, the radio waves, took their sweet time showing up. Corsi had been waiting since August 17, when the gravitational waves were spotted. “Longest two weeks of my life,” Corsi says. The radio waves were key to understanding a superfast particle jet launched by the colliding stars.
Early on, the jet appeared to have been smothered by a plume of debris from the collision (SN: 12/20/17). But follow-up radio observations made by Corsi’s team and others confirmed that the jet had punched through the wreckage (SN: 2/22/19). This jet was the first of its kind to be seen from the side, allowing Corsi and colleagues to probe its structure. The jet almost certainly would have gone unnoticed if the gravitational waves hadn’t clued astronomers in.
Big goal
Corsi is a pioneer in the new field of multimessenger astronomy, which pairs observations of light waves with spacetime ripples, or gravitational waves. The pairing is like having eyes and ears on the cosmos, Corsi says. “You cannot learn all that you could with only one of the two.” In the case of GW170817, gravitational waves revealed how the neutron stars danced around each other as they spiraled toward collision, and light waves unveiled the type of material left in the aftermath (SN: 10/23/19). Using this multimessenger approach could also give astronomers a more complete picture of other cataclysms, such as smashups between neutron stars and black holes, and the explosive deaths of massive stars. Such spectacular events “reveal some of the most fundamental physics in our universe,” Corsi says.
If gravitational wave signals were converted into sound, they would create their own kind of music.
Most researchers specialize in either gravitational waves or light, but Corsi “is very well-versed in both messengers,” says Wen-fai Fong, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “That makes her extremely versatile in terms of the types of multimessenger science she can study.”
What’s next
Corsi has now built a computational tool to scan LIGO data for gravitational waves stirred up by whatever is left behind in a neutron star merger. The tool is based on a paper she published in 2009 — years before LIGO scored its first gravitational wave detection (SN: 2/11/16). The paper describes the gravitational wave pattern that would signal the presence of one possible remnant: a rapidly spinning, elongated neutron star. Alternatively, a neutron star smashup could leave behind a black hole. Knowing which “tells us a lot about how matter behaves at densities way higher than we could ever explore in a lab,” Corsi says.
Inspiration
Corsi taught herself to play the piano in high school, and now enjoys playing both classical music and tunes from favorite childhood movies, like Beauty and the Beast. The audio frequencies of piano notes are similar to the frequencies of spacetime tremors picked up by LIGO. If gravitational wave signals were converted into sound, they would create their own kind of music. “That’s the thing I like to think of when I’m playing,” she says. — Maria Temming
Affiliation: Colorado State University Hometown: Richmond, R.I. Favorite outdoor activities: Cross-country skiing and gardening
Motivation
Emily Fischer has always cared about air pollution. “It’s innate.… It’s a calling,” she says. Exposure to air pollution raises your risk for many common ailments, such as cardiovascular disease, asthma, diabetes and obesity. But unlike some other risk factors for these diseases, “you can’t choose not to breathe, right? You have to have clean air for everyone.” In her youth, she organized rallies to clean up the cigarette smoke–filled air of her Rhode Island high school. That interest led Fischer to study atmospheric chemistry and motivates her current work as a self-described air pollution detective. Air pollution may conjure images of thick black plumes billowing from smokestacks, but Fischer says most air pollution is invisible and poorly understood. She combines analytical chemistry with high-flying techniques to understand where air pollution comes from and how it changes as it moves through the air.
Bold idea
Wildfire smoke like that filling the skies in the American West this season is a major, but still mysterious, source of air pollution. Thousands of different solids, liquids and gases swirl together to form wildfire smoke, and its chemical composition changes as it blows through the atmosphere. This dynamic mixture, which is also affected by what’s burning on the ground, is tricky to measure, since each of its many components requires highly specialized equipment and expertise to assess. The equipment also has to be airborne, typically lofted into the air via planes or balloons. “There has been beautiful work on wildfire smoke,” Fischer says, “but in most studies, we just have not had all the measurements needed to really interpret things.”
“You can’t choose not to breathe, right? You have to have clean air for everyone.”
Emily Fischer
To get a fuller view, she dreamed big: “Why not try to measure everything, and measure it systematically?” She pulled together a diverse team of 10 lead researchers, and scores more graduate students and postdocs, to pull off the most comprehensive analysis of wildfire smoke ever attempted, a project dubbed WE-CAN. During the summer of 2018, Fischer led over a dozen six-hour flights over the West, chasing wildfire smoke plumes and systematically measuring the air in and around smoke plumes with nearly 30 different instruments crammed into the cargo hold of a C-130 plane.
“[WE-CAN] is a big collaboration,” says Ronald Cohen, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California, Berkeley. He says success stemmed in large part from the team that came together.
“Making an environment for successful collaboration is really satisfying to me,” Fischer says.
While team members are still analyzing the data, the project is already revealing some of the smoke’s secrets. For example, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide — two chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems — are abundant in wildfire smoke. Recent wildfires show how important it is to understand the role of climate change in fires, Fischer says, and “who is most vulnerable in our society, and how we can best prepare and protect those communities.”
Fisher is also planning to adapt some of what she’s learned from WE-CAN to track ammonia emissions from farms and feed lots, which are another major source of air pollution.
Big goal
Fischer is deeply committed to bringing more undergraduate women, especially women of color, into the geosciences. And she’s using science to figure out how. She brought a team of social scientists and geoscientists together to study how different interventions can help. She and colleagues found that for every female role model a student has, her probability of continuing on in her geosciences major roughly doubles. Having someone to look up to who looks like them is key to building a sense of belonging and identity as a scientist, Fischer says. To help build that network, Fischer started PROGRESS, a workshop and mentorship program that aims to support undergraduate women in the geosciences. Started at Colorado State University in 2014, the program has since expanded, reaching over 300 women at institutions across the United States.
For her own mentees, Fischer tries to instill a willingness to take risks and go after big, bold questions. “The easy things are done,” she says. Pushing forward our understanding of pressing questions means chasing research projects that might lead nowhere, she says, or might crack open a new field of research. “It’s OK to be wrong, and it’s OK to take risks. That’s what science needs right now.” — Jonathan Lambert
Affiliation: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Hometown: Mumbai, India Favorite element: Gold
Big goal
Prashant Jain explores how light interacts with matter — such as how plants use sunlight to photosynthesize — and applies that knowledge to new problems. He recently took lessons from nature to convert carbon dioxide into other useful molecules. In a paper last year in Nature Communications, Jain and Sungju Yu, also at Illinois at the time, reported using gold nanoparticles as a catalyst to drive chemical reactions between carbon dioxide and water.
When light hit the nanoparticles, it set off a series of reactions that converted carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels such as methane and propane. In essence, the process not only sucked carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas — out of the air, but it also made that carbon into fuel. No wonder the oil giant Shell is funding Jain’s work. The whole process isn’t very efficient, so Jain is working to improve how much carbon dioxide gets used and how much fuel gets produced. But along the way he hopes to learn more about how nature uses energy to make matter — and to inspire his lab to create more sustainable and renewable energy technologies.
“I am myself still a student.”
Prashant Jain
In another example of using chemistry to push toward future technologies, Jain and colleagues shined light on gold and platinum nanoparticles and triggered reactions that liberated hydrogen from ammonia molecules. Hydrogen is important in many industries — fuel cells for zero-carbon vehicles use it, for example — but it can be dangerous to transport because it’s flammable. Jain’s discovery could allow workers to transport ammonia instead, which is safer, and then free the hydrogen from the ammonia once it has arrived where’s it needed. The work was reported online in July in Angewandte Chemie.
Superpower
Jain has a remarkable ability and optimism to see unsuccessful laboratory experiments as successful steps toward understanding the natural world, says Karthish Manthiram, a chemical engineer at MIT. As a first-year graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Manthiram remembers being frustrated that his experiments weren’t turning out as expected. But Jain, a postdoctoral fellow in the same lab, stepped in to help and recast the problematic results. “He’s always viewed what others see as failure as moments of clarity that build up to moments when things make more sense,” Manthiram says. “For me that was an important lesson in how to be a scientist.”
Inspiration
Growing up in a family that worked mostly in business and finance, Jain fell in love with science as a preteen — inspired in part by watching the movie Jurassic Park and its fictional depiction of what might be possible through understanding the molecular world. Soon he spotted a physics textbook for sale from a street vendor and bought it. “I tried to read the book, nothing much made sense,” he says. “I wanted to be the one to figure out all these mysteries of nature.” He chose to major in chemical engineering in college (inspired in part by a magazine published by the chemical company DuPont), and then switched to physical chemistry when he moved to the United States to get a Ph.D.
Promoted this year to full professor, Jain has never stopped pushing to acquire new knowledge; when he finished teaching this last spring semester, he enrolled in an online MIT course on quantum information science. “I am myself still a student,” he says. — Alexandra Witze
Affiliation: Indiana University Hometown: Houston, Texas Favorite fieldwork: Observing rituals
Standout research
Between 2000 and 2015, at a high school of about 2,000 students in the town of Poplar Grove (a pseudonym), 16 former and current students died by suicide; three other similar-aged individuals in the community, mostly at private schools, also took their own lives. A clinician who had grown up in the town reached out to Anna Mueller for help breaking the cruel cycle. Before that e-mail in fall 2013, Mueller was using big data to understand why teen and young adult suicide rates in the United States were spiking. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that suicides among 10- to 24-year-olds jumped 56 percent between 2007 and 2017.
Scholars theorized that suicidal people attracted other suicidal people. But Mueller’s work undercut that idea. In 2015 in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, for instance, she reported that merely having a suicidal friend did not increase a teen’s suicide risk. A teen’s risk only went up with awareness that a teenage friend had made a suicide attempt. “Knowledge of the attempt matters to transforming … risk,” Mueller says. She carried an understanding of that contagion effect to Poplar Grove, where she worked with sociologist Seth Abrutyn of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the half of the duo who is more focused on the theoretical.
Anna Mueller’s long-term goal is to create a sort of litmus test that identifies schools that could be at risk of a suicide cluster.
The team conducted 110 interviews and focus group meetings, lasting from 45 minutes to four hours, with Poplar Grove residents, plus some individuals outside the community for comparison. The team’s research revealed that teens felt an intense pressure to achieve in their affluent, mostly white town, where everybody seemed to know everyone else. While teens and young adults in a first wave of suicides might have had mental health problems, peers and community members often attributed those deaths to the town’s pressure cooker environment. That narrative, however incomplete, was especially strong when the youth who killed themselves were classic overachievers. Tragically, over time, that script became embedded in the local culture, making even youth who weren’t previously suicidal see suicide as a viable option (SN: 4/3/19), Mueller says.
Mueller and Abrutyn were among the first researchers to start chipping away at the underlying reasons for why suicide rates have been rising in high schoolers, particularly overachieving girls without obvious underlying mental health problems, says Bernice Pescosolido, a sociologist at Indiana University in Bloomington who helped bring Mueller into the school’s sociology department. “What Anna and Seth have really been able to show is how imitation works and what the contagion effect looks like on the ground.”
Big goal
Mueller’s long-term goal is to create a sort of litmus test that identifies schools that could be at risk of a suicide cluster. That way, school and community leaders can intervene before the first suicide and its resulting firestorm. Since fall 2018, she has been researching suicide trends in school districts in Colorado that are more diverse than Poplar Grove. When it comes to school culture, her early work shows, there’s often a trade-off between academic or athletic excellence and a supportive environment.
Top tool
In anticipation of her work in Poplar Grove, Mueller knew she needed a more boots-on-the-ground approach than her big data training allowed. So she trained in qualitative methods, including how to design a study; interview techniques, such as how to write questions to elicit desired conversations; and the detailed data analysis required for this research tactic.
Mueller also sees the value in observing interactions, a common sociological approach. This spring, with the pandemic in full swing, she spent a lot of time on her home computer watching socially distant graduation ceremonies in her Colorado schools. She found that a school’s culture showed in the details, such as whether valedictorians addressed hot-button issues, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, in their speeches. “Of all of my moments in the field, rituals are the ones that tug at my own heartstrings because I’m watching kids graduate and that’s just inherently beautiful, but it also is a very powerful data moment,” she says. — Sujata Gupta
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Affiliation: MIT Hometown: Adelaide, Australia Favorite subatomic particle: The gluon
Big goal
When Phiala Shanahan was a graduate student, she was shocked to learn that experiments disagreed on the size of the proton (SN: 9/10/19). “Protons and neutrons are the key building blocks of 99 percent of the visible matter in the universe,” she says. “And we know, in some sense, surprisingly little about their internal structure.”
“If there’s something I don’t understand, I’m extremely stubborn when it comes to figuring out the answer.”
Phiala Shanahan
That ignorance inspires her studies. She aims to calculate the characteristics of protons and neutrons based on fundamental physics. That includes not just their size, but also their mass and the nature of their components — how, for example, the quarks and gluons that make them up are sprinkled around inside. Such calculations can help scientists put the standard model, the theory that governs elementary particles and their interactions, to the test.
Standout research
Shanahan is known for her prowess calculating the influence of gluons, particles that carry the strong force, which binds the proton together. For example, when gluons’ contributions are included, the proton is squeezed to a pressure greater than estimated to exist within incredibly dense neutron stars, she and a coauthor reported in Physical Review Letters in 2019. “It’s a very remarkable calculation,” says physicist Volker Burkert of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Va. “That’s very fundamental, and it’s the first time it has been done.” Because they have no electric charge, gluons tend to elude experimental measurements, and that has left the particles neglected in theoretical calculations as well. Shanahan’s gluon results should be testable at a new particle collider, the Electron-Ion Collider, planned to be built at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, N.Y. (SN: 4/18/17).
Superpower
Persistence. “I hate not knowing something,” she says. “So if there’s something I don’t understand, I’m extremely stubborn when it comes to figuring out the answer.”
Top tool
A technique called lattice QCD is the foundation for Shanahan’s work. It’s named for quantum chromodynamics, the piece of the standard model that describes the behavior of quarks and gluons. QCD should allow scientists to predict the properties of protons and neutrons from the bottom up, but the theory is incredibly complex, making full calculations impossible to perform even on the best available supercomputers. Lattice QCD is a shortcut. It breaks up space and time into a grid on which particles reside, simplifying calculations. Shanahan is leading efforts to use machine learning to rev up lattice QCD calculations — putting her persistence to good use. “We don’t have to rely on computers getting better. We can have smarter algorithms for exploiting those computers,” she says. She hopes to speed up calculations enough that she can go beyond protons and neutrons, working her way up to the properties of atomic nuclei. — Emily Conover
Affiliation: Caltech Hometown: Kolomna, Russia Favorite protein: He can’t pick just one
Bold idea
Mikhail Shapiro believes that in the future, “we’re going to have smart biological devices that are roaming our bodies, diagnosing and treating disease” — something akin to the submarine in the 1966 classic sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage. As the shrunken sub entered and repaired the body of a sick scientist, commanders on the outside helped control it. “Similarly, we’re going to want to talk to the cells that we are going to send into the body to treat cancer, or inflammation, or neurological diseases,” Shapiro says.
Shapiro and his colleagues are working on building, watching and controlling such cellular submarines in the real world. Such a deep view inside the body might offer clues to basic science questions, such as how communities of gut bacteria grow, how immune cells migrate through the body or how brains are built cell by cell.
Despite his futuristic visions, Shapiro is often drawn to the past. “I like science history a lot,” he says. Right now, he’s in the middle of rereading the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Just before that, he read a biography of Marie Curie.
Standout research
“There is not a protein that I learn about that I don’t think about ways to misuse it,” Shapiro says. But he’s especially fond of the proteins that build the outer shell of gas vesicles in certain kinds of bacteria. These microscopic air bags “have so many uses that were totally unanticipated,” Shapiro says.
In addition to letting bacteria sink or float, these bubbles provide a communication system, Shapiro and colleagues have found. Over the last several years, they have coaxed both bacterial cells and human cells to make gas vesicles and have placed such cells within mice. Because the air-filled pockets reflect sound, the engineered cells can be tracked from outside a mouse’s body. Using patterns of sound waves, the researchers can also drive bacterial cells around in lab dishes.
“There is not a protein that I learn about that I don’t think about ways to misuse it.”
Mikhail Shapiro
In another nod to Fantastic Voyage, scientists can weaponize these cellular submarines. “We’ve essentially turned cells into suicide agents triggered by ultrasound,” Shapiro says. This explosion could release chemicals into the surroundings and destroy nearby cells. This sort of targeted detonation could be damaging to tumors, for instance. “Complete warfare is possible,” he says.
By seeing the potential in these esoteric gas vesicles, Shapiro was “ahead of his time and hugely innovative,” says Jason Lewis, a molecular imaging scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what his work will do in terms of a greater impact.”
Motivation
“Frustration,” Shapiro says, is what made him switch to engineering after studying neuroscience as an undergraduate at Brown University in Providence, R.I. He realized that existing tools for studying processes inside the brain fell short. “And I didn’t see enough people making better tools.”
But he didn’t stop at developing new neuroscience technologies. “Oddly enough, once I got into the engineering part of things, I got so fascinated with weird proteins, and magnetic fields, and sound waves, and all the more physics-y side of things. That’s become as much, if not more, of my passion as the original neuroscience.” In his Twitter bio, Shapiro describes his expertise as succinctly as possible: “Bio-Acousto-Magneto-Neuro-Chemical Engineer at Caltech.” — Laura Sanders
Affiliation: Stanford University Hometown: Nanjing, China Favorite organism: Planarian
Inspiration
Planarians are the most charismatic of all flatworms, Bo Wang says. “They have this childish cuteness that people just love.” But the adorable facade isn’t what drew Wang to study the deceptively simple worms, which resemble little arrows with eyes. It was planarians’ superpower: regeneration. Slice a planarian into pieces and, within a week or two, each chunk will grow into a new flatworm — head and all. Studying the cells that drive this process could offer lessons for turning on regeneration in human tissues, to treat various diseases, regrow limbs and grow organs for next-generation transplants.
Bold idea
Wang uses statistical physics to figure out how planarians regenerate entire organs cell by cell. Newly formed brain cells, for instance, must physically position themselves to avoid turning into “amorphous aggregates,” Wang says. His interest in how things fit together began in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, Wang trained as a physicist and worked on self-assembling materials. Wang now works to uncover the physical rules that living cells follow. “I’m fascinated by how molecules arrange themselves seemingly randomly, but there are still statistical rules that those molecules will follow,” he says.
Bo Wang works to uncover the physical rules that living cells follow.
His physics-based approach is raising new questions and unveiling biological processes that would be hard for biologists to come by using traditional methods alone, says regeneration biologist Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Mo. Wang is “a new breed” of flatworm biologist, Sánchez Alvarado says. “He is occupying a very unique niche in the community of developmental biology.”
Standout research
Wang and colleagues recently found that nerve cells, or neurons, in regenerating planarian brains form a predictable pattern dictated by the types of cells in their midst. Planarians brains are akin to cities made up of neighborhoods of neurons. Within each neighborhood, no two neurons that do the same job will live next to each other; those cells repulse each other but stay close enough to communicate, the researchers reported in the May Nature Physics. Because of this behavior, increasing the types of neurons in a neighborhood limits the ways cells can pack together. The team dubbed this packing process “chromatic jamming,” after a famous mathematical puzzle called the four-color problem (SN: 3/6/09).
The finding is surprising and challenges “what we think we understand about organogenesis and about organization of cells within an organ,” says Sánchez Alvarado. Chromatic jamming appears to be key to how the planarian brain comes together, guiding single cells into neighborhoods that are a driving force in organ development, he says. If similar physical rules apply to human cells, that could help scientists sketch blueprints for engineering and growing artificial organs. — Cassie Martin
Affiliation: Stowers Institute for Medical Research Hometown: Glenwood, Iowa Favorite organism: Fission yeast
Backstory
An invitation to work in the lab of her genetics professor Robert Malone at the University of Iowa in Iowa City set SaraH Zanders on the path to becoming a scientist. “It was a turning point in my life,” Zanders says. Before that, she didn’t really know how she would put her biology degree to use, or what it meant to be a scientist. In Malone’s lab, she fell in love with meiosis, the process by which organisms divvy up genetic information to pass on to future generations. The first step is julienning the genome and swapping pieces of chromosomes. “That just seems like such a bad idea to basically shred your [DNA] in the process of getting it from one generation to the next,” she says. She started studying the proteins involved in making the cuts. “It was like I was born to do that. I never would have known without that push.”
A different kind of push led Zanders to spell her first name with a capital H: An elementary school teacher kept leaving the letter off. Zanders has capitalized it for emphasis ever since. “If I write it without the big H, it doesn’t look like my name anymore,” she says. “It feels like somebody else.”
Standout research
Meiosis is full of conflict. For her postdoctoral work, Zanders focused on a particular type of dustup caused by some selfish genes — genes that propagate themselves even if it hurts the host. As the monk Gregor Mendel laid out in his study of pea plants, a particular version of a gene typically has a 50-50 chance of being passed on to the next generation. But the selfish genes Zanders was studying, a type called meiotic drivers because they propel themselves during meiosis, manage to get themselves inherited far more often. “These kinds of systems do a complete end run around Mendel’s laws,” says Daniel Barbash, an evolutionary geneticist at Cornell University.
In Schizosaccharomyces pombe, also called fission yeast, Zanders discovered, a family of selfish genes makes moves that would be right at home in a Game of Thrones story line. Zanders and colleagues were the first to work out the molecular tricks that thesegenes use to skirt Mendel’s laws, reporting the findings in eLife in 2017. The genes, known as wtf genes, produce both a poison and an antidote. All of the spores — the yeast’s gametes — get the poison, but only those that inherit certain gene versions also get an antidote. Spores that don’t get the antidote die, ensuring that only offspring with specific wtf gene versions survive to pass their genes on to the next generation. For the fission yeast, such predatory tactics can have big consequences, even driving two nearly identical strains toward becoming different species. Some selfish genes have made themselves essential for proper development (SN: 7/3/18). In humans and other animals, genetic conflicts may lead to infertility.
For the fission yeast, such predatory tactics can have big consequences, even driving two nearly identical strains toward becoming different species.
“This extremely important family of meiotic cheaters has been just sitting in plain sight waiting for somebody who had the right kind of lens and the care … to discover them,” says Harmit Malik, an evolutionary geneticist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and Zanders’ postdoctoral mentor. Zanders helped build a case that the skewed inheritance in these yeast was a real effect, not just fluctuations in the data. Before she began her work, virtually nothing was known about meiotic drivers in yeast. Now the wtf genes are among the best known meiotic drivers studied in any lab organism. Some selfish genes in worms also use the poison-antidote trick to beat the competition (SN: 5/11/17). Meiotic drivers in fruit flies, mice — and maybe humans — win genetic conflicts by other means (SN: 10/31/17; SN: 2/24/16).
Motivation
Zanders is now on the lookout for other genetic fights in yeast. Understanding such conflicts more generally may help answer big questions in evolution, as well as shedding light on human infertility. As for what motivates her, “It’s just I like to solve puzzles,” Zanders laughs. “I wish it was a deep desire to help people, but it’s definitely not that.” — Tina Hesman Saey
Affiliation: Caltech Hometown: Jinzhai County, China Favorite hobby: Carpentry
Big goal
As the Rose Parade wound through Pasadena, Calif., on January 1, 2020, Zhongwen Zhan listened to the underground echoes of the marching bands and dancers. With a sensitive technology known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, Zhan tracked the parade’s progress. He even identified the most ground-shaking band. (It was the Southern University and A&M College’s Human Jukebox.)
The study was a small but elegant proof of concept, revealing how DAS is capable of mapping out and distinguishing among small seismic sources that span just a few meters: zigzagging motorcycles, the heavy press of floats on the road, the steady pace of a marching band. But Zhan seeks to use the technology for bigger-picture scientific questions, including developing early warning systems for earthquakes, studying the forces that control the slow slide of glaciers and exploring seismic signals on other worlds.
Zhan has a “crystal-clear vision” of DAS’ scientific possibilities, says Nate Lindsey, a geophysicist at Stanford University who is also part of the small community of researchers exploring the uses of DAS. “When you get such a cool new tool, you like to just apply it to everything,” he adds. But Zhan’s expertise is “very deep, and it goes into many different areas. He knows what’s important.”
DAS piggybacks off the millions of fiber-optic cables that run beneath the ground, ferrying data for internet service, phones and televisions (SN: 6/14/18). Not all of the glass cables are in use all of the time, and these strands of “dark fiber” can be temporarily repurposed as seismic sensors. When pulses of light are fired into the fibers’ ends, defects in the glass reflect the light back to its source. As vibrations within the Earth shift and stretch the fibers, a pulse’s travel time also shifts.
Whole networks of seismic sensors could be deployed in places currently difficult or impossible to monitor — at the ocean bottom, atop Antarctic glaciers, on other planets.
Over the last few years, scientists have begun testing the effectiveness of these dark fibers as inexpensive, dense seismic arrays — which researchers call DAS — to help monitor earthquakes and create fine-scale images of the subsurface. In these settings, Zhan notes, DAS is proving to be a very useful supplement to existing seismograph networks. But the potential is far greater. Whole networks of sensors could be deployed in places currently difficult or impossible to monitor — at the bottom of the ocean, atop Antarctic glaciers, on other planets. “Seismology is a very observation-based field, so a seismic network is a fundamental tool,” he says.
Inspiration
“I’ve been interested in science since I was young, but wasn’t sure what kind of science I wanted to do,” Zhan says. In China, students usually have to decide on a field before they go to college, he adds, but “I was fortunate.” At age 15, Zhan was admitted to a special class for younger kids within the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. The program allowed him to try out different research fields. A nature lover, Zhan gravitated toward the earth sciences. “Environmental science, chemistry, atmospheric science — I tried all of them.”
Then, in late 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake ruptured the seafloor under the Indian Ocean, spawning deadly tsunamis (SN: 1/5/05). After hearing from a researcher studying the quake, Zhan knew he wanted to study seismology. “I was amazed by how seismologists can study very remote things by monitoring vibrations in the Earth,” Zhan says. The data “are just wiggles, complicated wiggles,” but so much info can be extracted. “And when we do it fast, it can provide a lot of benefit to society.” — Carolyn Gramling
