Vignettes (HT5) - New blog series - Metascience, a new Society of Technological Advancement (SOTA), and silencing of biosafety

“Technol­ogies are always constructive and beneficial, directly or indirectly….yet their consequences tend to increase in­stability….... Now the effectiveness of offensive weapons is such as to stultify all plausible defensive time scales…..For the kind of explosiveness that man will be able to contrive by 1980, the globe is dangerously small, its political units dangerously unstable….We should not deceive ourselves: once such possibilities become actual, they will be ex­ploited…...For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent ex­ercise of day-to-day judgement…. Survival - a possibility.”

John Von Neumann, ‘The smartest man who ever lived’, in "Can we survive Technology?", 1955

“Impishly, whenever [Max Perutz] was asked whether there are simple guidelines along which to organise research so that it will be highly creative, he would say: no politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews; just gifted, highly motivated people picked by a few [people] of good judgment. Certainly not the way research is usually run in our fuzzy democracy but, from a man of great gifts and of extremely good judgment, such a reply is not elitist. It is simply to be expected, for Max had practised it and shown that this recipe is right for those who, in science, want to beat the world by getting the best in the world to beat a path to their door.”  

Guardian obituary[2] of Max Perutz, Nobel Laureate and First director of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, one of the brilliant scientists who fled the Nazi’s and helped birth molecular biology in Cambridge, UK.

And a direct quote from Perutz:

“​Every now and then I receive visits from earnest men and women armed with questionnaires and tape recorders who want to find out what made the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (where I work) so remarkably creative...... creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organized. It arises spontaneously from individual talent. Well-run laboratories can foster it, but hierarchical organization, inflexible, bureaucratic rules, and mounds of futile paperwork can kill it. Discoveries cannot be planned; they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected corners.”

—---------------

‘Vignettes’ blog series

I’m going to experiment with doing some more regular and more informal/unpolished blogs with collections of things I’ve been thinking about, wish to highlight etc. Hopefully people can comment/critique to improve the arguments, spot errors, blind spots. I’ll then grow some of them into fuller blogs. I might open up a small prize fund to pay people for giving the best criticisms/error corrections/improvements to help me improve my thinking on these issues.

The ‘HT5’ in title refers to the stage of the academic calendar at Oxford (currently Hilary Term, week 5 - original email falsely said HT4… its Hilary Term 5 at the moment). I miss having the academic calendar which I used to organise my work around. I’ll try to post weekly or biweekly. 

In this blog are 3 self contained mini blogs:

• Metascience: Jason Crawford’s blog on the need to diversify away from the Principal Investigator model in research, at least relatively, which includes part of a talk I gave on a similar topic.

• Opportunity: A new UK-based Society for Technological Advancement, which I think people should try to help support and try to grow into something of historic significance. I think, given the context, it's much more likely to succeed than ARIA was when our network first began thinking of it, and ARIA is singing less than a decade later.

• Risk: Silencing of biosecurity voices and some media/blogosphere coverage of events I was involved in early 2020 on this relating to the origins of COVID19 that I haven’t written about before.

Pick and choose as suits your interests. I’ve covered some aspects of this before, but my subscriber count has doubled over the past 6 weeks.

Next time I’ll cover my personal views on the Blair-Hague report on Biotech which I was an author of, a pro-social technology agenda, physio-cognitive states and technologies to interact with them, and a 5 year plan. Hopefully this blog is going to transition progressively from identifying problems to creating solutions…..

Again if you’re only interested in the more polished stuff, tune out this ‘vignettes’ blog series which are more like open emails/hot takes.

My intended audience here on this blog is primarily, though far from exclusively, “someone roughly like I was 10 years ago” when I was first exploring this space of how to leverage technology for human advancement at the intersection of science, art, and policy/national strategy. 

PS - Quite a few people reached out to me recently after my panel appearance discussed below. I’m very keen to chat, but I’m currently very swamped as I got some kind of flu-like thing and spent much of christmas period under a duvet by the fire, and have been playing catch up ever since. Sorry if I am not very responsive over the next month. Please try reaching out again in a month. 

Metascience: Crawford’s piece on block funding not more ‘principal investigators’, and the ‘politics of gerontocracy’

This section relates to the introductory quotes re-Perutz, because those introductory quote are the opposite of our system today, and his advice cannot be followed without major reform of our approach. Ie, perhaps the greatest success of 20th century British science would be impossible in the vast majority of the UK R&D system. We tried putting forward a different organisational model partly learning from this (see ‘Lovelace’ below).

This relates to the question: How should we organise research to maximise outcomes over a sustained period of time? There is no one single approach that is best in all circumstances - plurality of approach is key. But we do not currently have a plurality of approaches, at least not at sufficient scale, concentration, and resources to be effective.

There is one core underlying assumption in the postwar consensus model that I think is increasingly broken by technological-political-cultural changes: the principal investigator ‘lab-based’ model of organising early stage research, with a grad student-postdoc-professor career pathway. It is not that this model has no validity and no use. Rather, it is markedly over present relative to other models.

It is such a totalising structure especially in the UK that, like Plato’s cave, those in it often struggle to see that it is an assumption of their system. Further, almost everybody with power in UK early stage research came from, and derives their prestige and power from, this model. As I’ve highlighted before here and here re ‘Lovelace’, this principal investigator (‘professor’) model is notably absent in some of the most impactful laboratories of the postwar period.

We need to recognise and understand this as its key to creating new kinds of science.

It is a delicate issue as there is great value in the Professorial approach for teaching and mentoring when it is done well. The Oxford tutorial system was one of the most important influences on my life. 

However, nowadays many of the supposed ‘superstar’ academics in my own area spend very little time doing any such mentoring, or even doing research. Instead they work on accumulating grants, honoraria, committee memberships, and hiring lots of postdocs. Ie, career success, research ability and mentoring success have become very misaligned. The system is increasingly broken and this is increasingly difficult for them to hide. Many admit this in private but won’t speak out to try and fix it. 

UKRI CEO Ottoline Leyser is a rare exception to this rule and has spoken out for over a decade on the broken nature of the research system, though I disagree with some of how she has approached trying to fix it.

What is an alternative?

Jason Crawford has written a piece about this in ‘roots of progress’, which was one of the original and still best ‘progress studies’ focussed blogs. Its titled “Making every researcher seek grants is a broken model: Funding should go to larger labs with many researchers, not to “principal investigators”.  

Crawford’s come to the conclusion that “principal investigator model is deeply broken and needs to be replaced.”

With his permission I’m copying across the whole thing as I found I couldn’t shorten the argument he makes much. I encourage you to read it.

“When Galileo wanted to study the heavens through his telescope, he got money from those legendary patrons of the Renaissance, the Medici. To win their favor, when he discovered the moons of Jupiter, he named them the Medicean Stars. Other scientists and inventors offered flashy gifts, such as Cornelis Drebbel’s perpetuum mobile (a sort of astronomical clock) given to King James, who made Drebbel court engineer in return. The other way to do research in those days was to be independently wealthy: the Victorian model of the gentleman scientist.

Galileo demonstrating law of gravity in presence of Giovanni de' Medici, 1839 fresco by Giuseppe BezzuoliMeisterdrucke

Eventually we decided that requiring researchers to seek wealthy patrons or have independent means was not the best way to do science. Today, researchers, in their role as “principal investigators” (PIs), apply to science funders for grants. In the US, the NIH spends nearly $48B annually, and the NSF over $11B, mainly to give such grants. Compared to the Renaissance, it is a rational, objective, democratic system.

However, I have come to believe that this principal investigator model is deeply broken and needs to be replaced.

That was the thought at the top of my mind coming out of a working group on “Accelerating Science” hosted by the Santa Fe Institute a few months ago. (The thoughts in this essay were inspired by many of the participants, but I take responsibility for any opinions expressed here. My thinking on this was also influenced by a talk given by James Phillips at a previous metascience conference. My own talk at the workshop was written up here earlier.)

What should we do instead of the PI model? Funding should go in a single block to a relatively large research organization of, say, hundreds of scientists. This is how some of the most effective, transformative labs in the world have been organized, from Bell Labs to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. It has been referred to as the “block funding” model.

Here’s why I think this model works:

Specialization

A principal investigator has to play multiple roles. They have to do science (researcher), recruit and manage grad students or research assistants (manager), maintain a lab budget (administrator), and write grants (fundraiser). These are different roles, and not everyone has the skill or inclination to do them all. The university model adds teaching, a fifth role.

The block organization allows for specialization: researchers can focus on research, managers can manage, and one leader can fundraise for the whole org. This allows each person to do what they are best at and enjoy, and it frees researchers from spending 30–50% of their time writing grants, as is typical for PIs.

I suspect it also creates more of an opportunity for leadership in research. Research leadership involves having a vision for an area to explore that will be highly fruitful—semiconductors, molecular biology, etc.—and then recruiting talent and resources to the cause. This seems more effective when done at the block level.

Side note: the distinction I’m talking about here, between block funding and PI funding, doesn’t say anything about where the funding comes from or how those decisions are made. But today, researchers are often asked to serve on committees that evaluate grants. Making funding decisions is yet another role we add to researchers, and one that also deserves to be its own specialty (especially since having researchers evaluate their own competitors sets up an inherent conflict of interest).

Research freedom and time horizons

There’s nothing inherent to the PI grant model that dictates the size of the grant, the scope of activities it covers, the length of time it is for, or the degree of freedom it allows the researcher. But in practice, PI funding has evolved toward small grants for incremental work, with little freedom for the researcher to change their plans or strategy.

I suspect the block funding model naturally lends itself to larger grants for longer time periods that are more at the vision level. When you’re funding a whole department, you’re funding a mission and placing trust in the leadership of the organization.

Also, breakthroughs are unpredictable, but the more people you have working on things, the more regularly they will happen. A lab can justify itself more easily with regular achievements. In this way one person’s accomplishment provides cover to those who are still toiling away.

Who evaluates researchers

In the PI model, grant applications are evaluated by funding agencies: in effect, each researcher is evaluated by the external world. In the block model, a researcher is evaluated by their manager and their peers. James Phillips illustrates with a diagram:

James Phillips

A manager who knows the researcher well, who has been following their work closely, and who talks to them about it regularly, can simply make better judgments about who is doing good work and whose programs have potential. (And again, developing good judgment about researchers and their potential is a specialized role—see point 1).

Further, when a researcher is evaluated impersonally by an external agency, they need to write up their work formally, which adds overhead to the process. They need to explain and justify their plans, which leads to more conservative proposals. They need to show outcomes regularly, which leads to more incremental work. And funding will disproportionately flow to people who are good at fundraising (which, again, deserves to be a specialized role).

To get scientific breakthroughs, we want to allow talented, dedicated people to pursue hunches for long periods of time. This means we need to trust the process, long before we see the outcome. Several participants in the workshop echoed this theme of trust. Trust like that is much stronger when based on a working relationship, rather than simply on a grant proposal.

If the block model is a superior alternative, how do we move towards it? I don’t have a blueprint. I doubt that existing labs will transform themselves into this model. But funders could signal their interest in funding labs like this, and new labs could be created or proposed on this model and seek such funding. I think the first step is spreading this idea.”

Fundamentally such a model shifts power from bureaucratic-administrative ‘processes’ toward human judgment, with a belief that overall the positives of human agency exceed the negatives. There are problems that come from such models too - nepotism, they can get quite ‘incestous’. And without the right review processes, it can risk defaulting to the problem it is partly trying to solve: allocation of resources based on power, not merit, with it becoming a fiefdom (Bell Labs was described as an ‘egalitarian meritocracy’). These issues can be addressed but needs remembering.

To be clear, I don’t think we should completely get rid of Principal Investigator grants, but I think it should be very substantially reduced. I’ll write more about this later. It is not easy to do.

In the UK context the Principal Investigator reliance is posing particular problems, in part because it means power and control is turned over on multi-decade timescales. The power rests in the hands of the past not the future.

In my opinion one of the most substantial and critical issues in UK R&D currently is that the rapid technological change over the past decade post-CRISPR/Deep Learning etc has created an enormous disconnect between the expertise of the credentialed senior figures from the Principal Investigator model and the actual cutting edge of the technology. There are very, very few genuinely world class people in the 45+ age range within academia in modern AI and Synthetic Biology, despite those being central to two of the three core technologies of the 2021 Integrated Review (AI + Engineering Biology). This is a problem globally but it's especially pronounced in the UK due its dependence on academia. “Science proceeds one funeral at a time” is too slow given the rapid change. I also know with high confidence that some of those who appear to fit that mold inside the UK system are basically taking credit for things their postdocs/grad students did. Some of them actively tried to block their students doing things such as Deep Learning, and now are posing as experts in it. This has many bad implications.

Now transitioning to broader, more political considerations and a segway to the next section……. 

Richard Hanania is quite a curious and provocative thinker. I don’t agree with him on everything but we need voices like him exploring things people might find heretical at present. 

Hanania recently published a piece  ‘Critical Age Theory: toward a news politics of anti-gerontocracy’.  which is highly relevant to R&D. As I have written elsewhere, one of the major trends since 1945 is the gerontrification of our research system (see here and ctrl+F “hierarchical bureaucracies” to find the section). I think these changes in our  R&D system are part of a much more broader trend in our society which Hanania highlights. 

I’m going to quote a few parts:

“Political movements are usually motivated by a grand narrative. What successful political movements tend not to do is simply provide a series of policy recommendations without any kind of story tying them all together…….Today, I’d argue that many of the problems of Western society are caused by [this] underlying dynamic — a natural status quo bias and concentrated interests that in effect end up privileging the old over the young… when it comes to age, we see group disparities in favor of the old alongside legal and social institutions set up to officially favor them.” “An anti-gerontocracy movement would advocate the following solutions to many of the major problems society faces. The goal is to dismantle age privilege, which has in effect made young people poorer, less likely to have families, and in a state of perpetual adolescence. Concrete proposals include…Giving the youth an even playing field in the labor market by abolishing seniority systems and cutting back or eliminating age discrimination laws”

This kind of agenda in the context of R&D is needed in my view. 

There are significant obstacles. Just one example: a practical way in which this applies in UK science and technology is in the UK public appointments process system introduced under New Labour. This controls all key appointments to science-related positions under government control. In this public appointments system it is fine to specify requirements which equate to credentials that only the older people can have, but “we need some fresh faces here not the usual suspects” is effectively not allowed. The laws against age discrimination further empower this (it is not allowed to say ‘we want younger people’ but it is allowed to specify criteria that only an older person could have. There are workarounds but they are cumbersome). This system allows an in group to maintain its power, as they control that credential system.  Also, because it is now so difficult legally to remove someone who is underperforming, strong risk aversion is built into the process.

I won’t go into it in detail now but I saw attempts to block those who had done exceptional and historic work to help us on the pandemic response from getting credentialed/recognised. As the system defaults almost always to ‘listen to the credentialed stakeholders’, this is a problem.

An example is the two people in their late twenties who in April 2020 built the first model of rapid testing (I’m not on the paper as I was in Number Ten and couldn’t write publicly) for us in Number Ten, showing quantitatively the critical point that the foundation of UK National Strategy testing strategy was based on a flawed assumption, then who worked tirelessly to help overturn this bad advice to Number Ten. It took literally 4 months and a political side intervention to overturn the group think, yet those most critical to it never got honours, whilst some of those who had been blockers got them. I spent a week gathering material and writing them honours nominations but this was blocked.

This in April 2020, by Gaurav Venkataraman and Gergo Bohner, is the first ever model showing that a rapid testing strategy could be equivalent to a lockdown in efficacy. This was later confirmed empirically by the Slovakians [published in Science]. The fact that two graduate students in their late twenties provided key evidence that the establishment position was wrong and helped trigger the change of government approach is generally not welcome amongst those prestigious and credentialed figures that they proved wrong. There are many truly excellent and honest people inside this credential system, like Sir Patrick Vallance, but it's the collective overall behaviour that is important. Collective behaviour is not a linear sum of individual personalities.

These facts have conveniently been disappeared by the system……

What is to be done?

A New Society - SOTA: The Society for Technological Advancement

“The best way to predict the future is to create it”

Quote from computer visionary Alan Kay, a key adviser to our #10 Sci/Tech Team prior to us entering Number Ten, and also the founding 1st principle of the new society for technological advancement.

“Ada Lovelace dreamt of a ‘poetical science’[5] for a better world, a creative venture at odds with the cold and calculating image of today’s science. Lovelace’s most famous vision saw computers going beyond barren computation, writing that they ‘might act upon other things besides numbers... the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent'. She foresaw by a century the computer revolution and our technological society. Visions such as these extend to other fields, beyond computing. Lovelace herself also dreamt of a world of human flight, of influencing the mind-body relationship, of enhancing thought itself[6]. Yet we forget that those planes in the sky and medicines in ourselves were once but dreams in the minds of the Lovelaces of the past, and so we forget to nurture the Lovelaces of today.”

Ada Lovelace Society vision doc, co-written by a group of junior researchers at the intersection of science and technology, convened via 10 Downing Street in 2020.

“All we have to do is create opportunity for those who want to take risk. If we start funding this, there will be a long line of young people who are willing to participate, and will release a huge energy which has so far been suppressed. That’s why I’m trying to promote this message.”

Garry Kasparov, 13th World Chess Champion and Human Rights Activist, in an interview with me in 2013 where we discussed the need to harness the power of technological transformation to advance civilisation [link].

What society in the UK is exploring and advocating with vigour and ambition for the possibilities of a world transformed for the better through science and technology? What society is convening people imagining terraforming mars, imagining transforming the NHS through AI, imagining how to 10X the productivity of each of our factory workers through AI? What society is putting forward bold proposals to reimagine how we conduct research? What society is convening 18 year old wizz kids with people like Demis Hassabis and James Dyson on near equal terms to brainstorm a better future through science and tech as they would in Silicon Valley, where events mix people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman with completely unknown people over informal events? What society is the meeting ground for people who believe in technological advancement as a core driver of human progress?

What society is, in short, pursuing not only narrow scientific truth, but technological possibility through the interaction of science, engineering, entrepreneurship, society, and art, regardless of the interests of the status quo?

None. 

But there may now be an embryo for one that could grow into it.

First, it is not the Royal Society. The Royal Society has a great history. It still does important work, for example when it said that on balance it was worth it from a cost-benefit perspective to wear face masks for COVID until we had more evidence, a point which the bureaucracies struggled to understand. It has made many important contributions over the 350+ plus years it has existed. 

However, this age is inevitably showing. It is now quite preoccupied with prestige and who to admit as members. As I highlighted before, the average age of a new fellow of the royal society is 61. This is just 5 years younger than the official UK state pension age. Only 14% of Fellows are under 60. This isn’t just reflecting a broader prolonging of human life, it also reflects a profound conservatism - it took a decade after he rewrote the genetic code for Jason Chin to become an FRS. The Royal Society itself was founded in 1660 by people including those who had not published any world leading research yet or were in their twenties/early thirties - Thomas Willis, Hooke, Wren etc. The society was a crucial vehicle to their future success, as it was in bringing Isaac Newton out of his hermitage. But now the average age of a new fellow of the royal society is now roughly 50% higher than the average age of the people who founded it.

This contradicts my own view that the phrase ‘scientific establishment’ should be an oxymoron - the whole point of science as process is to overturn what we knew before - as Feynman said, ‘science is the belief in the ignorance of experts’. Whilst it's inevitable that some kind of elite/establishment arises - it always does in a complex society - you need measures to continually break that power and renew the system. Currently, it is only death.

So the Royal Society at present embodies a fundamentally credentialist and ossified science system. Credentials are important for how societies function (see, for example, Samo Burja’s argument that ‘science needs sovereigns’ which I largely agree with). But, as I wrote above, how those credentials are given out is key to understanding whether a society is forward or backward looking.

In a rational world, the grad students who devised the UK mass testing strategy in their student rooms would be made FRS’ and thus credentialed to the system.

For an excellent description of how honours in science can go wrong, see the video of Richard Feynman here. Its a very good description of the present system -  ‘The prize is the pleasure of finding things out… the kick that other people use it….those are the real things… the honours are unreal, I dont believe in honours… it bothers me… I can’t stand it… the whole thing was rotten.” Feynam resigned from the US National Academy of Sciences for this reason. I’ve found that most of the very, very best scientists (in my judgment) have a similar attitude - one of my main influences, Eric Betzig, even said as much in his own interview with the Nobel organisation after winning the Nobel Prize - ‘accomplishments not accolades’.

So, long way of saying: I’d encourage people not to aspire to be an FRS unless they very narrowly want to focus on ‘science’, but rather aspire to be part of creating something new, just as the likes of Wren, Hooke, and Willis did in 1660. Those founders were often a hybrid of engineer, futurist, and scientist, what we might now call a ‘technoscientist’. They were less interested in labels and prestige at the start and more interested in inventing and discovering (though as they got older the prestige games kicked in - see Newton vs Hooke!).

Which brings us to a new start up society for technological advancement…..

On 29th January I spoke on a panel for the launch of a new society: The Society for Technological Advancement - SOTA. The two other panellists were Anders Sandberg, renowned futurist and transhumanist at Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, and Lee Cronin, who is an unusual Regius Professor at Glasgow focussed on building and inventing (see Cronin’s interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast).

SOTA has been formed by a group of young tech minded people as a spin-out from a Polaris Fellowship, which is run by Entrepeneur First (Co-founded by ARIA Chair Matt Clifford). I was connected to them by someone who is very well known in tech circles and basically said “these people are fantastic, you should try to help them”.

It was in a packed hall and almost everybody stayed until the end, then we each spent an hour or so chatting directly with attendees. Almost all of them were young student/start up types. This all strongly confirmed my view that there is a large pool of young people who want to try and create a new way of approaching science and technology and are deeply dissatisfied with the existing system.

The principles of the new society…..

First, the existing Royal Society’s latest principles:

“-Independence -Partnership and convening -Equality, diversity and Inclusion - International and global focus”

And its mission: “The Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.”

Source for both here.

SOTA’s principles are:

1. “The best way to predict is to create.Our future is not predetermined but is a direct consequence of our actions. We strive for impact through agency, high conviction and industriousness.”

I think it's a great founding principle for a new society. This phrase comes from the great computing pioneer Alan Kay’s “The best way to predict the future is to create it”.  We adopted it in our 2018 Telegraph op-ed laying out some of the early weirdo-misfit science agenda, with our concluding sentence saying “We should lead the future by creating it.”. It was then used as the title of the 2021 government Innovation Strategy “Leading the future by creating it”. The British State has therefore already endorsed the first founding principle of the society, which is helpful. It is also helpful that this is a fundamentally forward looking principle.

2. “Technology is the extension of human creative intelligent output. We value technological progress in its variety as a way to overcome challenges, transcend constraints, and improve our chances of surviving environmental selection pressures.”

Also agree. Technology is the art of turning science fiction into science fact is a phrase I’ve been entertaining. In my mind at present, the transition point is on creation and building, which is a cultural shift that we need to diversify our approach to science and technology.

I think of Leonardo as the first person who approached science as an explicitly creative endeavour. As Isaacson writes in his biography of Leonardo, based on a comment from Royal Curator Martin Clayton, Leonardo likely never saw any divide between his art, engineering, and science. It was all an expression of and extension of his creative output.

3. Technology is key to human fulfilment.We believe human fulfilment can be achieved by building and contributing towards techno-scientific progress which benefits us and the whole species.”

Yes. By my definition much of human progress, including artistic progress, is technological progress. Technology is innovation, and innovation is fundamental to human progress. See Michael Muthukrishna’s recent book to explore this more (will blog on this soon).  

Note their use of ‘technoscience’ phrase - we used this in Blair-Hague reports.

4. “The best defence is a good offence.Our positive attitude towards technology and our ability to use it for good is the only way to overcome those who want to use it for bad.”

Yes this is my view essentially, though there are serious risks needed. 

A key challenge on ensuring a net positive outcome is getting the defence services modernised. Keith Dear, John Bew, some of the weirdo-misfit team (not me) and many others worked wonders on the 2021 Integrated Review of UK National Strategy which tried to emphasise this, but there is a serious need for delivery and real reform here. You can’t pursue a strong tech push without ensuring your defenses against tech advancement are strong. That drone technology’s impact in the Ukraine war has been such a surprise to many in defence orbits is a sign of how bad the situation is.

“We plan to build a vibrant permanent community of techno-optimists in the UK. Our launch event will be followed by a series of hackathons, informational campaigns and social events to grow our movement.”

Agree. 

I think this is a really important venture to undertake and could be transformational if it can be supported and grown in the right way. There have been initiatives and enterprises like ARIA and Future of Humanity Institute looking to create funders and research with an orientation to the future of technology. But we have been missing a vehicle for a community.

Our original thinking in Number Ten around the Lovelace/Disruptive Innovation lab concept was it should be an Ada Lovelace Society. A new way of bringing together creative and inventive researchers, entrepreneurs, funders, and more, with a fellowship at the center of it.

A challenge we had in Number Ten was that there was no emergent, bottom up structure for us to fund. It’s not always possible but for new things as a preference you want to find people committed to the mission, trying to do it already, before the lure of big government money arises and other types begin circling…..

Now, through SOTA, there is such an organisation in embryonic form that could seed a new kind of society of technology and science. To be clear, I had nothing to do with the setup of this new society prior to being invited to appear on the panel, and deserve none of the credit. But I do want to try to help the founding team and encourage you to also.

Like all start ups, this endeavour may go nowhere. But its bottom up sparks like this that ultimately grow into things of historical significance. I’m quietly optimistic as discussions I’ve had with some senior people on this have been very positive and they have offered support.

Three personal takes on priorities:

First, they are already work to put together a great opening speaker list, and I’m trying to help them with this. If we can get people like Demis Hassabis, James Dyson, Kate Bingham etc it will be a great platform to build on. If you agree with the need for such a society, please help them likewise!

Second, they need funding. If you know a donor who would like to be a founding donor to this organisation, please reach out to them (or me if its easier and I’ll connect you in). This is the key bottleneck right now.

Third, founding principles of renewal and ‘promise not prestige’ - its useful to think now about how you start this in such a way it doesn’t fall into the pitfalls that other organisations have, becoming composed of the past not the future. Something I’ve suggested is a combination of a) Fellowship is time limited, after which people become ‘Emeritus Fellows’. This de-risks awarding fellowships and makes it more directly about empowering the fellows to contribute, not a medallion at the end of a career. b) It have something like a ‘Bell labs rule’ - an average age of fellows as 37, the average age of a Bell Labs member of technical staff which barely shifted over the many decades of operation. If it just becomes about giving fellowships to people who have done their best work, you might as well stick with what we have. ‘Promise, not prestige’ as the Lovelace doc put it.

If you want to be a part of it, sign up to the mailing list here: https://ilikethefuture.com/

People interested in this agenda: I also highly recommend applying for the Civic Future Fellowship. Link here. It’s founded by Munira Mirza, who was my line manager and mentor in Number Ten as Head of the Policy Unit. She is one of the most impressive people I’ve ever met and a fantastic person. The goal of Civic Future is to help mentor and produce the next generation of public figures. We really need to increase the quality of people in public service, and especially get more people literate in technology. I can’t imagine a better mentor than Munira for this. I wish I’d thought to invite Munira to the SOTA launch in time for her to be able to make it, but as I said above the last month I have been completely swamped. 

People getting involved in SOTA could benefit from such a program. It's weird going from being a science grad student to suddenly sitting in Number Ten, and I imagine it might be similar for others trying to get involved in public life/govt/building societies.

As an aside, Munira deserves a great deal of credit for protecting the science and tech team after Dom left, as do others like Baroness Finn and David Davis. ARIA would not have survived without their actions. I think Labour also deserve credit for keeping science/tech as a relatively non-politicised, bipartisan agenda which is what it needs to be as much as possible.

Biosecurity

Exactly how many people died from COVID19 is unclear and depends on methodology, with confirmed deaths numbering around 7 million, but the true number may be upwards of 20 million.

Two key questions:

1. How did it start?

2. How can we stop this or worse from happening again?

These are vast topics. I’ve spent a lot of the past 4 years trying to help work on them. Here I’ll just highlight a few things and follow up on subsequent blogs. I’m going to repost some coverage of events from early 2020 that I was involved in, then pivot to concerns that the issue of how to take biosecurity seriously is being thwarted by poor conduct in the science community, particularly the virologists and journals.

I’ll cover more in context of Blair-Hague report next time. Section 4 of that report covers Biosecurity. If you work in government and want to see first steps on what needs to be done, please read that.

…..

First, some events from early 2020 immediately peri-me joining Number Ten, and the ‘DEFUSE’ proposal leak which documents how to make a virus just like COVID19 in Chapel Hill and Wuhan, written in..… 2018. Those two research labs are the main coronavirus gain of function centers globally.

Dominic Cummings has written the following on his blog which I’m copying across as it covers me. Cummings blog is very interesting and I encourage people to subscribe to it. I don’t agree with everything but I do agree with him on many core issues facing how western governments function and the need to place science and technology at the very centre of UK National Strategy, as per the 2021 Integrated Review. 

I also agree with him that the inquiry is not sufficiently looking in the right places or talking to enough of the right people to understand what happened in 2020. Note the events he is describing below are inseparable from an understanding of how the state understands and orients correctly to novel pathogens. If governments had known they were likely dealing with a lab escape in January 2020, the response would likely have been quite different.

From his blog here:

“In spring 2020 Whitehall’s top scientists and the top intelligence officials walked into the PM’s office and told the PM and me that lab leak ‘is definitely false’ and ‘a conspiracy theory’. (James Phillips, a scientist and original ‘weirdo and misfit’, said to me: their confidence is totally misplaced, there are MANY highly suspicious signals — and he was clearly right.) Not one hack has noticed that a page of my evidence to the Inquiry was redacted by the Cabinet Office on ‘national security’ grounds. And when I checked with the Inquiry they confirmed this means that the judge also will not see such redactions — even though the joke Inquiry fought legal action to get access to private messages on the basis it needs all information to judge ‘the general context’ of decisions. Clearly this does not include absolutely critical information on ‘general context’ that would embarrass Whitehall. Whitehall wants no investigation of how and why the PM was given such monumentally false advice and encouraged to pass on this duff advice to the world. The real misinformation almost always comes from our rotten regimes and the old media. And remember, this same rotten system is responsible for advice today on multiple wars and biosecurity, AI etc…

According to the Guardian, ‘whatever’ the facts, the ‘real’ cause was ‘the wildlife trade’:

In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines:

And according to the New York Times’ covid analyst, it’s ‘racist’ to discuss a lab leak.

Continuation: 

[the system needs reform because of]“....continued insane funding of gain-of-function (e.g new experiments to make covid super-lethal for humans), absolute determination of all western governments to ignore planning for worse-than-covid pandemics, senior scientists working hard to continue the mad world in which their papers in Science and Nature are a more important metric/incentive than millions dead. This madness is in parallel to more and more information leaking out about what some scientists and Fauci were really doing in funding gain-of-function in Wuhan to evade scrutiny. 

Just this week new details were released (under FOI, not because the government is actively seeking the truth) showing that the plans for Wuhan experiments engineering viruses, covered up in London and DC, strongly resembled the covid that hit us much more than previously realised: i.e many of the mysteries in covid’s RNA are not mysterious when you realise scientists proposed creating the changes we see in covid RNA. The chances that a) scientists wrote down a specific plan for specific RNA changes engineered in Wuhan then b) a natural virus turned up with these precise changes ‘in a market in Wuhan’ is … close to zero. I like Scott Alexander’s blog but I think his take on this is wrong and I largely agree with Curtis Yarvin(one of the very few who called covid correctly much earlier than mainstream scientists / public health ‘experts’).

One of the original ‘weirdos and misfits’, James Phillips, a scientist who had himself worked on RNA engineering, said right at the start in spring 2020 that official advice on lab leak to the PM was wrong. He was also one of those who said the DHSC had totally botched rapid tests. This is a great example of the value of having an outside perspective / Red Team available to a PM. And a good example of Whitehall’s attitude to truth-seeking: it’s fought bitterly and successfully to stop all such things and Sunak is their faithful servant. Obviously the Inquiry hasn’t bothered speaking to the one scientist working in the PM’s office in 2020 who had worked on engineering viruses. I’ll bet the Inquiry gives Whitehall ammo to exclude such outside voices even more effectively.”

I don’t agree with Curtis Yarvin’s broader politics but his assessment, which Dom links to, of this issue and why such research to make pandemics in a lab is still happening is worth reading.

Cummings describes one of the meetings we had on this issue here in a brief 1 minute clip with Dwarkesh Patel and I encourage you to watch it - it is an unusually candid description of the issues we face.

Tom Whipple, Science editor the Times covered this story. Note he used to be quite anti-lab leak but appears to have updated honestly. Here are some excerpts:

“The documents form a grant proposal from 2018 for a pre-pandemic collaboration between US and Chinese scientists. The proposal described how coronaviruses could be found, combined and cultured with the ability to infect human cells. The stated idea was to find ways to protect against the emergence of zoonotic viruses.

The proposal of more than a thousand pages, released after a freedom of information request, outlines the full details of the plans. Michael Lin, associate professor of neurobiology and bioengineering at Stanford University, called the full document “quite shocking.”

Lin said that it did not constitute a recipe to make Sars-CoV-2, as some have claimed. “However,” he wrote on Twitter/X, “the intention was to identify natural viruses with features that would help them infect cells. So it may be not much of a difference functionally.”

Proponents of the “lab leak hypothesis” argue that even if the original proposal was rejected by the US funding agency Darpa, it could have been carried out anyway in China, perhaps using updated protocols.

Francois Balloux, director of the UCL Genetics Institute, said that after seeing the full details of the project, known as Defuse, he felt a lab leak was more likely as a cause, but far from definitive. “While the Defuse proposal doesn’t provide incontrovertible evidence for Sars-CoV-2 having been engineered, it definitely shifts the prior towards a lab origin.”

He added, in reference to an increasingly fractious debate: “Those people denying it are arguing in bad faith.””

I agree with Balloux’s take re bad faith, but also as I show below there is also an extreme information bubble on this in the prestige scientific journals who will literally not publish anything contrary to zoonotic origins.

“Cummings said the latest release showed that scientists “planned to engineer changes that match just what we see in Covid and it’s unarguable that the US and UK governments have covered this up”.

Writing on his blog, he said: “In spring 2020 Whitehall’s top scientists and the top intelligence officials walked into the PM’s office and told the PM and me that lab leak ‘is definitely false’ and ‘a conspiracy theory’.”

He added that one of his own advisors, James Phillips, formerly a neuroscientist, said at the time that their confidence was misplaced. Cummings implied that his subsequent attempts to expose what he called the “monumentally false advice” Johnson received on this topic were redacted by the Covid Inquiry.”

We can see from the Times article the increasingly transparently fallacious arguments being made to try to dismiss the reality that SARS-CoV-2 was very likely the result of a research accident:

However, other scientists argued the new details did not fundamentally change our understanding of the pandemic. Michael Worobey, of the University of Arizona, whose research has pointed to a market origin for the virus, said the proposal “just reinforces what we have known for a long time”, and that the genetic engineering proposed was very different from that which it had been previously claimed could have created Sars-CoV-2.

This is a complete nonsequitor from Worobey. We did not know the detail in the leaked paper, though a smaller part of it did leak 2 years ago. It is accurate that the genetic engineering proposed in the DEFUSE grant application is different to the strawperson case used to discredit the possibility of lab leak earlier, but that is not a point in Worobey’s favour. Rather, it is a strong reason to update your beliefs to lab leak.

Note Worobey is a lead author of a likely totally debunked Science paper claiming COVID came from a wet market - The Royal Statistical Society just published a paper by professional mathematicians showing the analysis in his paper is completely flawed, as had been pointed out many times previously. This does not get covered in Science/Nature of course, who only publish evidence one way. Worobey claims he is going to refute it but I wouldn’t hold your breath. 

There is no evidence whatsoever that COVID19 arose naturally - none. It is all debunked. And frankly at this point if some magically pops up one has to be suspicious….

Another argument in the Times piece:

Charlotte Houldcroft, who leads the virus genomics group at the University of Cambridge, said that in her view the proposal on its own was not unusual. “Plenty of people have shown, before and after 2020, ways to make a pathogen with pandemic potential through lots of different methods, eg the horsepox from fragments paper, and it doesn’t mean any of them actually have.”

Likewise, Houldcroft’s statement doesn’t make any sense at all. If a major horsepox outbreak appeared right next to the only known research program aiming precisely to make highly human transmissible horsepox, with viral signatures never seen in nature before but exactly as in the proposal, far away from any known natural repository of horsepox, we would rightly think that the Horsepox research program had had an accident.

I hope it's clear how transparently nonsensical these arguments printed in the Times are. It's literally the best they’ve got at this point. It's not Whipple’s fault the arguments are bad, he is simply reporting the best both sides of the debate have to offer.

If you want to read a summary of why the DEFUSE leak is significant, read this by the former Science editor of the New York Times “The story of the decade: new documents strengthen - perhaps conclusively - the lab leak hypothesis of COVID19”, and this by Emily Kopp who is a very brave and tireless reporter whose FOI’s uncovered these documents (note the restriction enzyme argument is not necessary for the conclusions). The fact these documents were held for 4 years unreleased is shocking. There are likely more. Many institutions, including in the UK, are still not releasing potentially highly important information, as Ian Birrel writes here.

If you want a 2 hour presentation of the case, see this excellent discussion with Matt Ridley who wrote the book on it with Alina Chan. 

If you want to learn about how the very authors of the main ‘evidence’ against lab leak privately thought, during and after writing it, that it was very plausible that a lab leak had happened and explicitly doctored their conclusions for political reasons, read this by Ian Birrell which includes subpoenaed correspondence between the authors.

My position is that the FBI’s assessment of ‘moderate confidence’ lab leak is accurate according to the definitions of ‘moderate confidence’ used in US Intelligence assessments. This has been my position since early April 2020 prior to entering Number Ten.

I will not discuss anything about what happened inside Number Ten on this issue that goes beyond that Dom has said so don’t try to get me to. There is also a lot of broader biosecurity thinking that isn’t sensible to write about publicly due to information hazards (not giving adversaries ideas etc).

I think it's highly important that the relevant parliamentary committees on national security investigate this issue and biosecurity in the appropriate way, as these issues will recur. But the emphasis needs to be on: how do we stop this happening again? ‘Blaming China’ is not the right approach here and will be counterproductive. It's likely in my view that some of the blame for what happened rests in the west and the broader virology community, with insanely dangerous research being planned and done despite many clear warnings (Obama banned funding this research from 2014-7). 

What likely happened in Wuhan is just a specific instance of a much broader systemic problem, and one that precisely nothing has been done to address since COVID19.

An information bubble and culture of omerta

I opened this blog with a quotation from John Von Neumann’s “Can we survive technology?”.

We are living in the branch of history where we have, so far, survived technology. There may be other branches of history where we perished in nuclear war, or other universes with different physical laws that mean civilisation cannot arise. For example, it's hard to see how civilization could exist if it were possible to make a nuclear weapon-scale bomb in your basement from over-the-counter, everyday ingredients like flour and glucose. Fortunately our laws of physics do not appear to allow it.

The posture advocated by Von Neumann is essentially ‘for progress there is no cure’ and that we need a strong defence, and this has been the foundation of our thinking on this throughout the atomic era. But Von Neumann did not foresee or consider (that we know of) the development of technology that would allow individual actors with low cost equipment to create weapons with hydrogen-bomb level devastation. The technologies he warned of all required nation state resources.

I’m not going to get into specifics here, some of it we covered in section 4 (biosecurity) of the recent Blair-Hague report. But put simply, it is now a near term likelihood (and possible today) that rogue actors could create pandemics without needing nation state resources. I’ll blog more later on how to defend against this.

But first, to be able to address this we need to know what reality is. Whilst many threats and dangers pose information hazards that mean it's counterproductive to have it as headline news, we at least need a scientific class that is honest and debates the dangers of what is being done. This is not happening. Rather, the powers that be are largely doing the exact opposite. Whilst journals like Nature and Science and organisations like the Royal Society warned of these threats before COVID19, they have gone eerily silent since. We have quite a number of quotes now from private correspondence of virologists essentially saying “we can’t acknowledge this or governments will regulate our research”.

This is having bad consequences already. Columnist Juliet Samuel wrote an excellent piece in The Times (the newspaper read by the people who run the country, as Yes Minister humorously put it) last week. It’s titled ‘Science leaders should ditch the activism’). Here are some relevant excerpts:

“In a shrinking list of trusted authorities, scientists remain close to the top. The government, the church, the media and even the Post Office might all have had their scandals but, outside climate-denying, antivax circles, “the science” was still sacrosanct. Then along came Covid and raised the scientific establishment to the status of government, judge and jury.

Now the backlash has begun. It may not have reached the establishment, where “the science” is still regarded as akin to the Gospel, but distrust of science and scientists is on its way to becoming mainstream. And like all the other flawed institutions struggling to adapt to the new world of decentralised information and fragmenting authority, the scientific establishment thoroughly deserves its fate.

For me, it wasn’t the lockdowns that did it. It was the lab leak debate. I was one of those poor “educated” chumps who trusted the early reassurances from top scientists that Covid couldn’t possibly have come from a lab. And the more I think about it, the more unforgivable it seems.

Sometimes, I do a thought experiment. What would have happened in January 2020 if the world had quickly become aware of the real possibility that the deadly new cold virus circulating in China, rather than being of natural origin, had been engineered and leaked from a virology lab?….. a coterie of prominent scientists in the US and UK made it their business to kill the lab leak theory with as much force and speed as possible.

Most shockingly, they did so even though in private many of them agreed it was entirely feasible…In this they were aided by prominent British scientific journals such as The Lancet, which published a hugely influential letter from scientists in February 2020 denouncing a lab leak as a “conspiracy theory”. The journal then took 16 months to acknowledge a major conflict of interest by one of its key signatories. In the meantime, the lab theory was consigned by most experts and governments to the realm of crackpot misinformation.

None of the people involved in this debacle have lost their jobs or even their respectability. Far from it: this week the Financial Times published a glowing profile of Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, which made only a glancing reference to the journal’s Covid activism. Horton was seemingly not even asked about the matter.”

The piece goes on more broadly to warn about the consequences of the ideological and activist takeover of research, and concludes:

“Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that there were a startling number of British scientists among the lab leak deniers. Gone are the days when our researchers claim to have nothing to do with practical or political matters. But the airy culture of superiority remains; the notion that if scientists deign to involve themselves in politics, it must be inherently for the good of science and humanity. This attitude did not work out well for the church and it is not serving the interests of true scientific endeavour either.

Covid ought to have been a profoundly humbling moment for the scientific establishment. Instead, its leading lights remain deep in denial.“

I’ll write more on this issue later but the core point is that the institutions of science are not allowing debate on this issue. They are censoring this issue for political reasons.

I recently had a dinner with a prominent UK scientist who works on viruses, and I decided to ask him what he thought of COVID origins and probe what he knew about the evidence for lab leak. I was unsurprised to find out he knew essentially nothing of the evidence for it. 

As I wrote in the intro to my blog about the politicisation of science journals:

“I got interested in this issue as I’d been particularly concerned by the behaviour of Nature and Science giving highly misleading and selective analysis of the COVID lab leak debate, an issue I had been following very closely when I was inside government. I felt their misrepresentations were meaningfully altering decision making on answering important questions. Recently a bipartisan group including very senior US National Security professionals wrote an open letter raising concerns about the journals’ conductand I agree with what they wrote. I think this phenomena of an illusion of consensus in the research community on politically sensitive issues being created is happening much more broadly than just this one issue.”

The linked open letter documents the misconduct of these journals. 

This is still a live issue. There was a survey by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute last week showing that most virologists do not think it was a lab leak. It bounced around twitter a fair bit. But this headline is not informative, for reasons intriguingly contained in the survey itself. It transpires that only around 20% of the ‘experts’ had even heard of the leaked grant proposal to modify COVIDs in Wuhan in exactly the way we see in COVID19.  Ie, the experts do not know the very basics of the issue.  Why is this? Again, Nature/Science simply won’t report it (nor will they publish refutations of the dodgy papers they have published on this issue).

The survey also shows that if it was found to be a lab leak, people would be more likely to support tougher biosecurity measures. Whilst rationally the question of whether it was a lab leak is irrelevant to biosecurity, in practice they are related as politics is driven by events and  is not rational.

This omerta is so extreme that leading institutions will literally issue ultimatums to their scientists telling them not to discuss it publicly. Justin Kinney, who co-founded Biosafety Now which campaigns for biosecurity improvement, was told last month that he had to stop his advocacy for biosecurity or leave Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (a very prestigious US institution). He was in the acknowledgements section of our report re biosecurity - within 3 days of publishing he was silenced, though it appears to be a coincidence.

Tweet here.

Of course, this also does not get reported in the scientific journals.

Whilst many academics have left twitter, reporters and the general public have not: they can see this. My tweet on this above was, for example, retweeted by Keith Dear, who wrote the UK Integrated Review and is well known in defence and security circles.

All of this is a catastrophe for science, and harmful for our safety. I don’t think the powers that be in science realise the damage they are doing by forsaking truth for ideology. 

I’ll follow up with a ‘what is to be done’ in terms of how we defend against what Kevin Esvelt rightly describes as a future in which thousands of people can create and release new pandemics. In the mean time, I recommend reading his Geneva Center for Security Policy paper ‘Delay, Detect, Defend’.  If you are in orbit of government please try to get people reading this.