Day: December 18, 2017

It seems hard to fathom that scientific progress has advanced to a point where it’s suddenly possible for people to undertake something as complicated as gene therapy outside the safety and confines of a well-funded lab, but it has. In just the past few months we’ve seen not one, but two examples of people pursuing unregulated gene therapy. That’s right, people are genetically modifying their bodies in DIY labs and friend’s apartments.

Now, the largest organization of scientists who work in gene and cell therapy have come out against DIY gene therapies. A statement from the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy comes on the heels of a stern warning against DIY gene therapy from the US Food and Drug Administration. For years, when it came to biohacking, regulators and establishment science have mainly looked the other way. That seems to be changing.

“As the largest professional society representing gene and cell therapy in the world, ASGCT does not support the practice of unregulated gene therapies because such procedures are potentially dangerous and highly unlikely to provide therapeutic benefit,” the organization said in its statement.

The statement, the organization said in an email, was in response to several stories reported by Gizmodo, among them the story of a well-known biohacker injecting himself with the gene-editing tool CRISPR at a conference and a 27-year-old software engineer administering an untested HIV therapy while livestreaming on Facebook.

Seemingly in response to those two public performances, the FDA issued a statement noting that selling supplies intended for DIY gene therapy is illegal and actually performing it is unsafe.

The ASGCT followed suit, arguing that DIY attempts at gene therapy are simply unsafe.

“ASGCT understands and profoundly sympathizes with the desperation that patients can feel when confronted with dire clinical prognoses,” the statement read. “However, ASGCT strongly discourages individuals from administering or seeking out unregulated or ‘do-it-yourself’ gene therapies. The field of gene therapy has been developing for more than 30 years with the goal of improving the quality of life of patients with serious diseases through proven, safe, and effective treatments derived from rigorous scientific and clinical research.”

Neither the FDA nor a consortium of scientists seem likely to dissuade those on the frontline of do-it-yourself science.

When asked about the statement, Josiah Zayner, the guy who injected himself with CRISPR at a conference, said the ASGCT’s statement didn’t even seem like that stern of a warning.

“It didn’t outright condemn the stuff people were doing,” he told Gizmodo.  

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Earlier this week, representatives from automotive and airline companies, big banks, software companies, and the military met to learn the basics of quantum mechanics at NASA. And that was only a small part of it.

Quantum computing software startup QCWare hosted the first quantum computing for business, or Q2B conference, at NASA Ames. Businesspeople seriously considering quantum computing met with experts, entrepreneurs, and professors to learn and see what future quantum computing might have in store for their businesses. There’s been plenty of progress and a lot of hope despite the fact that quantum computing is still in its 1950s, room-sized punch card computing phase. And importantly, conference participants also learned how to realistically judge how “good” a quantum computer really is.

Rumors have swelled that Google will announce “quantum supremacy” soon—essentially, that they will have created a quantum processing device that can solve a problem provably and unequivocally faster than a regular computer can. Such would be a major milestone in the quantum computing world, and Google hinted to some of the details at the conference.

“Press releases always talk about quantum space race in number of qubits,” said John Martinis, University of California, Santa Barbara physicist working with Google on their Quantum Supremacy project. “It’s more than just quantity, it’s qubit quality.” More on that in just a bit.

As a reminder, conventional computers are machines that perform calculations using a series of bits—any physical system whose most basic parts can take on one of two discrete values, like a coin. A quantum computer instead has quantum bits, or qubits. Qubits have some probability of simultaneously being zero or one during a calculation. Quantum computing algorithms perform calculations by manipulating these qubits via the mathematics of quantum mechanics. At its core, that math is just probability combined with complex numbers and the linear algebra you may have learned during your freshman year of college.

The next biggest quantum computing milestone is for some company to show unequivocally that their machine can easily solve problems difficult for a classical computer to solve. Not only does that company need a good quantum computer, but it needs the right problem to stump a classical computer. That problem must be hard, require a lot of high-quality qubits, and be generalizable to any quantum computer, said Martinis.

In Google’s case, the team will set up a quantum circuit with their qubits by entangling them (essentially, setting up a quantum link between them) and then allowing the system to evolve over time. At the end, how the qubits evolve is set by the rules of quantum mechanics, but the final measurement could take on different values with different probabilities. Figuring out the possible outcomes of the qubits, alongside the probability of measuring the outcomes, is so complex that the classical computer needs to simulate the quantum computer in order to do so, and might take weeks to do what the quantum computer can do in minutes.

This problem will offer the researchers a metric that can demonstrate not only that the quanutm computer has too many qubits to simulate classically, but also require the qubits to be good ones. That means they can’t produce the wrong value or turn into regular bits by interacting with the environment or other qubits for a long time. There are other quantum supremacy problems, too. These problems aren’t that useful for industry, but test the limits of regular computing and even the limits of quantum mechanics. And since they require the most advanced classical computers running their fastest algorithms for comparison, these problems will help push the boundaries of regular computing, too.

Google is in the midst of fabricating their 49 or 50 qubit quantum supremacy device this month, and will begin testing in two weeks (not taking Christmas vacation delays into account), said Martinis. But there are other kinds of quantum computers based on different architectures. One startup, IonQ, will use atoms trapped by lasers. Microsoft is working on a different kind of “topological” qubit based on the behaviors of many electrons, and longtime quantum computing business D-Wave uses a specialized system called quantum annealing to perform optimization problems.

Companies like Volkswagen, Airbus, Citibank and Emerson, European IT giant Atos, as well as venture capital firms were present to hear the presentations, and how potential applications like optimization and machine learning could help their businesses.

It’s clear to all that businesses won’t be able to take advantage of quantum computing for quite some time, maybe decades. But just know that people are thinking about this and all the different ways we might be able to use these computers. And you should expect to see companies hit some more major quantum computing milestones soon.

After all, we’re in the midst of entering a new era of quantum computing called the NISQ era, for Noisy, Intermediate-Scale quantum computer, explained John Preskill, CalTech theoretical physicist. But eyes are on the prize: a general purpose quantum computer. Fault tolerance, creating high-quality qubits (often from many physical qubits) that don’t error out, is what many are focused on as much as they are on the number of qubits. Preskill said “Progress towards fault tolerant quantum computer must continue.”

The U.S. government says 62 people in Puerto Rico have officially died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Not many people are buying that given the island’s lack of electricity, healthcare access, and clean drinking water.

To account for this discrepancy, media outlets have been making an extra effort to uncover the true extent of death on the island. Their conclusion? That 62 should be closer to 1,000.

Publications like Latino USA and The New York Times released their own analyses on Thursday and Friday, respectively, after looking at how mortality data in September and October from the Demographic Registry of Puerto Rico compares to 2015 and 2016. The Times found that 1,052 more people died than usual. The numbers are especially high on the days immediately following September 20, when Maria hit the U.S. territory.

Cities like Manatí, Jayuya, and Aguadilla saw some of the highest death rates.

In September, the island saw a major spike in deaths from sepsis, an extreme body response to infection that attacks tissue, which the Times attributes to delayed medical treatment or poor conditions in homes and hospitals. Puerto Rico has been dealing with a range of health care crises since the hurricane, and getting people proper, timely treatment has been a challenge.

The leading causes of death were diabetes and Alzheimer’s. As Times reporter Frances Robles noted on Twitter, insulin is supposed to be refrigerated.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, the drug can lose its effectiveness when exposed to extreme temperatures. And Puerto Rico was in the 90s after the storm.

The Puerto Rican government can keep blaming this rise on coincidence, but advocates, lawyers, and physicians are taking matters into their own hands.

A delegation of more than 30 people in Washington, D.C., on Thursday presented a petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to address the human rights issues on the island post-Maria. Among the requests? That the commission halt fiscal austerity measures the U.S. has imposed on Puerto Rico due to its debt crisis, as well as the repeal of a federal law—PROMESA—passed to aid with the crisis.

The commission likely won’t respond for another few days, but Commission President Margarette May Macaulay did note the commission would send a formal request for the United States to conduct an on-site visit to Puerto Rico as soon as possible next year.

This came after the commission heard testimony after testimony about life on the island. More than two months since the hurricane hit the island, things should be getting back to normal, right? However, many of these U.S. citizens are still struggling to find normalcy and the island isn’t even meeting 70 percent of its energy output.

Those who testified talked about coal ash contamination in the South, which they’ve received no update about from the government. They don’t know for sure whether a five-story-high coal ash pile has leaked into their water supply— but they do know the government did nothing to prevent that. The pile was left uncovered during Hurricane Maria. They discussed the exacerbated poverty their pueblos are seeing after the hurricane, as well as the ongoing inability from local hospitals to help their sick relatives.

“We have a problem in Puerto Rico, and it’s one of discrimination,” said Annette Martínez Orabona, director of the Caribbean Institute for Human Rights, in Spanish, her voice breaking. “It’s about discrimination that stems from our colonial relationship because we haven’t been given the opportunity to practice our right to self-determine, and that should remain clear.”

The commission heard what both sides had to say, but Puerto Rican officials didn’t send a representative to attend the meeting alongside other U.S. government reps. Maybe they’re too busy trying to update the official death toll?

Macauley was obviously curious herself about this, asking why. Interim Permanent Representative at the U.S. Mission to the Organization of American States Kevin Sullivan, the only U.S. official to speak during the hearing, wouldn’t elaborate why not a single Puerto Rican official could attend this human rights hearing. He simply said they reached out to ask Puerto Rican officials for input and received a letter, which wasn’t read.

“It is very unfortunate that these things are happening, which we call natural disasters, but which are, in fact, man-made because we’ve destroyed our world. And we continue to do so,” said Macaulay, as she closed out the meeting. “It would be good for us to wake up and smell the roses instead of smelling chemicals.”