RR: Why do you write science fiction?

CJC: Science fiction is what I read. As a child, I liked adventures, exploration, ‘what-ifs’ and fairy tales. I liked sea stories and memorised all the parts of a clipper ship before I was eight. And this was in landlocked Oklahoma. Before I was nine, I wanted to see mountains taller than the Wichitas and I wanted to see an ocean. I wanted to see a narwhal. I wanted to ride camels and explore the desert. I halfway believed in lost worlds.

Around that year, some fireworks blew up at a county fair display, so the show was cancelled. My father and I walked toward the parking lot, and I was dejected about the loss of the fireworks. And then my dad said urgently: “Look up!” He pointed to a shooting star. There was immediately another. And another. “Celestial fireworks,” he said, and we sat out there and watched the most magnificent meteorite fall I’ve ever seen. That was when I became aware of the heavens.

And when I was 10, at a summer camp, and needed a packet from home, my dad bought me a paperback book and included it with Mum’s gifts of cookies and the practicalities of clean underwear. It was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and the City of Gold. I was hooked. I read everything Burroughs wrote… and it was a short hop to John Carter of Mars, Flash Gordon, and to the wide universe. I became hooked on Flash Gordon – the Buster Crabbe version – and when the series ended, I was so bereft, I started writing my own stories with my own characters – because I had heard about plagiarism. I never stopped after that. I wrote obsessively, every day. And still do.

You’ve been praised for building intricate, believable worlds. How do you incorporate science into this process?

My academic background is in linguistics and the ancient world. I’ve studied geology, climatology, planetary weather, archaeology, history, anthropology and animal behaviour. When I build a world, it’s from the core outward, and evolution upward.

Your characters are often outsiders – the last of their kind, or separated from their species. Is this deliberate?

I like writing about other cultures… but you don’t [necessarily] get to know them if you place them in conflict, or have only one individual from that culture under a microscope. First contact is an interesting scenario, but in the real world of science, if it’s going to go well, it will take time. The Foreigner books, for instance, have the initial contact scenario – but the action starts two centuries later. And travelling about the world, often with only one companion, I’ve found myself in the outsider’s position, having to use my skills at interpretation and having to solve problems, while knowing very little about the language.

How would you describe your writing process, and do you have any writing tips?

My most basic hint is – study everything. Nothing on or off a planet, inside or outside of a star system, is irrelevant to your study. Even bubblegum pop is a phenomenon worth understanding. Think cosmically, and make it understandable for John and Jane Smith, householders, with a mortgage, and a life grown perhaps more sedentary than they ever wished. Give them adventures. Make them think. Carry them to places they need to go and make their lives happier. Writing? I can do that lying on a hillside watching the clouds go by.

You’ve made a strong push to provide e-books without digital rights management to your fans. What challenges have you faced?

It’s a continually moving target: formats change, formats die, new devices arrive, rights are in question, pirates try to claim your work as theirs, and getting your readers to know where to find your work is a challenge. But my readers are clever folk, and very good people. I maintain an online presence where I can talk and listen directly to readers, and they are beyond supportive and good-hearted. I always feel happy when I’ve been exchanging ideas with them.

Apart from Foreigner, what’s on your horizon?

I’ll be doing another in the Cyteen universe – and I’ll be looking, too, at some of my ‘orphaned’ series, series that one publisher brought out, and then that publisher evaporated, changed focus, or otherwise dissipated on me: and of course none of the other publishers want to take up an abandoned series in today’s market – and that has left a whole set of stories untold. So I’ll be putting out some new things in e-format only, under my own imprint. I’ll be thinking up new things. And I’ll be working steadily… three house moves in seven years kind of slowed me down, but I’m settled now in a very nice place – we’ve even built a koi pond – and life is good.

Image credit: Sharon Reynolds/Wikimedia

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British-born Peter Pringle spent 30 years as a foreign correspondent, writing for magazines and newspapers such as The New York Times, The Observer and The Atlantic. Now based in New York City, he has authored or co-authored eight books, most recently a story of a famous scientific rip-off that followed the discovery of a cure for tuberculosis. He chats to COSMOS reviews editor Rivqa Rafael about the controversy.

RR: Why did you write Experiment Eleven?

PP: About 10 years ago I started writing books about science and politics. I got the bug for investigative journalism – about politics, war and corruption. I thought I could take on Margaret Mead’s memorable phrase about adding to the sum of accurate information in the world. A friend of mine who’s a dean of environmental sciences at Rutgers University said: “Why don’t you come and have a look in the archives in the basement – there’s a good story about discovery and about relationships between the professor and the student.” It’s not a new genre, but it was a very good story.

It must be quite a common story, where credit for research is taken unfairly.

One could go through the list. Did Pythagoras come up with his theorem or the Babylonians? Did Charles Darwin come up with the idea of evolution or was it Alfred Russell Wallace? Did Marconi invent the radio? I would say no – Alexander Popov, definitely. Yes, it’s a well-trodden field. And then there’s a law, Stigler’s law of eponymy: “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer”. It’s named for Stephen Stigler, a professor of statistics at the University of Chicago; but the idea was sociologist Robert Merton’s.

Selman Waksman was a Russian Jew who fled tsarist Russia in 1910 and took his degree at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He went to California for his PhD and came back to the department of microbiology, which in those days was a very young science. Up the road from Rutgers was the headquarters of Merck, the pharmaceutical company, and they were engaged in producing penicillin for gram-positive [bacterial] infection. They were desperate for something to treat gram-negative infections and gave Waksman a small stipend to set up a lab and search for it. He found several, but they were all too toxic. Along came Albert Schatz, also of Russian Jewish background, and he started working with Waksman as a graduate student. In 1943, he was searching around in a petri dish for something that would produce a decent antibiotic and he found one. And there came streptomycin.

Stealing the credit may be common, but a court case is a much less frequent outcome…

Absolutely. Some say it was the first. In 1944, it became clear that streptomycin was the first effective cure of tuberculosis. Until then, Waksman and Schatz’s relationship had been like that of a father and son. But Waksman began to exclude Schatz from reporters wanting to write up the miracle cure. Waksman wanted Schatz out of the way so he could claim sole credit for the discovery of streptomycin.

But then there’s a knotty question of the patent and the royalties. Initially, Merck was going to get the patent in return for funding Waksman, but for various reasons they couldn’t. So Rutgers took the patent back and, because Schatz was indeed one of the discoverers, there was this famous meeting between professor and student where the professor says “now sign this piece of paper, we’re signing it over to the university and we agree that neither of us will profit from this and it will all go to the good of mankind”. Several years later Schatz found out that Waksman had done a deal to get 20% of the royalties. Schatz had a street-smart uncle, who was a dentist. And he said: “Sue them. Sue the university, sue your professor, get your rightful place in history.” And he did. Schatz was recognised by the court as a co-discoverer of streptomycin and was given a percentage of the royalties and a lump sum – most of which went to his lawyer. Nonetheless, he got about US$12,000 a year for the life of the patent. So he came off OK, except two years later when Waksman alone received a Nobel Prize “for the discovery for streptomycin”.

Was it anything more than oversight?

Well, basically, yes. The prize is given for published papers on the particular topic. They don’t look at back-and-forth disputes between the discoverers, they just judge who was the most important person in that discovery. It’s a bit of that old European hierarchical tradition of the professor taking the credit. Schatz was nominated the same year with Waksman by somebody else, but they didn’t look at it. They regarded Schatz as a bench worker, under the direction of the maestro. In his acceptance lecture, Waksman did not mention Schatz, except in a list of his researchers in an appendix.

Does this kind of thing still happen?

There are lots of disputed Nobels still, aren’t there? The Nobel is the ultimate accolade in science. It separates receivers of the award from all other scientists like no other prize. It creates role models. It’s a very tricky business. The Nobel Committee as set up has a difficult choice to make; in the first place by selecting the right discovery, but then in the second, because the Nobel can still only be awarded to three people. And in biology, particularly now, many more than three people might be involved in the evolution of a discovery.

Coming from a broader journalistic background, how did you come to write about science?

My original degree was a science degree; I was a geologist for a year. I went on a quasi-expedition with a friend, and we drove from London to Tehran. The idea was that there were these ammonites in Dorset in the Jurassic, and if you could find them in the Alborz Mountains, north of Tehran, then you knew that during the Jurassic period, the sea extended across that landmass. And we found them. However, this momentous discovery was not what I thought I ought to be doing with the rest of my life. I’d always wanted to be a journalist. But I retained this love of science and, having written about politics and wars for 30 years as a foreign correspondent, I was very happy to go back to it. I’ve never been to Australia and I’ve always tried to get something to work on there. It might just work out with the next book. I hope so.

Image credit: Bloomsbury

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The first array zilched the couple’s electrical bill. The second freed them from the petrol pump. Both, he estimates, will pay for themselves in about 6.5 years, thanks to tax credits and a California law that lets them sell home-generated power to the grid at market rates. That means that on summer days, when owners of less-efficient homes are dialling up the air conditioning, they can sell power at peak rates… buying back in the evenings what they need for such uses as laundry or charging the cars, at as little as one-fifth the daytime price.

Parrott’s and Iwahashi’s lifestyle is a model for a decentralised energy future in which people generate their own energy, much as our ancestors once raised their own vegetables. But is it realistic?

Futurist and science-fiction writer Brenda Cooper, based in Seattle, Washington, thinks that such energy self-sufficiency is indeed the wave of the future. In part, she says, it will be driven by the desire to insulate us from the worst effects of climate change. “Bigger and broader storm systems are knocking out our old power grid pretty easily,” she says. “More self-sufficiency will allow households and businesses to be free of the grid. In a climate-change challenged world, this will be seen as a smart move.”

But if we’re striving for a carbon-neutral future to put the brakes on climate change, rooftop collectors may not be enough. Even Parrott and Iwahashi aren’t completely off the grid. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, residential needs account for only 22% of American energy use. It takes energy to build the couple’s cars, run the offices where they work, pave the streets they drive on, and build their energy-efficient house.

By 2063, it’s projected that the world will have more than nine billion people, all demanding developed-world standards of living. And while there is much to be gained from conservation, history says we find ever-new ways of using energy. Thom Mason is director of Tennessee-based Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which carries out much of America’s energy research. “Our standard of living is defined by energy consumption,” says Mason. “Standard of living equals energy use, and vice versa.”

Meeting this need will be difficult with conventional energy sources. “You can’t make the numbers add,” Mason says. “The demand will exceed what we can support and the environmental consequences would be pretty infeasible.”

This can be seen as an incredibly pessimistic point of view: a prescription for war, poverty, and – if we continue relying on fossil fuels – global environmental collapse. It’s also a challenge. “That’s why we need better alternatives,” Mason says.

HAPPILY, THERE ARE several alternatives, of which solar is one of the leading contenders – especially in Australia, where the nation’s entire electrical needs could be met by a perfectly efficient 50 x 50 km solar array in the sunniest portion of the desert. “Land is not an issue,” says Wes Stein, renewable energy manager at the National Solar Energy Centre, in Newcastle, north of Sydney. “There’s certainly enough to go around.”

Today, there are two basic solar technologies in use: photovoltaics, which generate electricity directly from light; and concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses mirrors to produce heat by focussing light.

Currently, photovoltaic cells are the primary form of solar power. Although they still represent less than 0.1% of total global energy production, they’re a proven technology that has been steadily dropping in price ever since NASA and other space agencies realised they were a good way to produce electricity for satellites and spacecraft.

For years, though, photovoltaics were viewed as too expensive for anything but specialised uses such as powering instruments at remote weather stations. However, just as the computer industry boasts Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles every two years, photovoltaic technology has Swanson’s Law. Named for Richard Swanson, founder of a California solar-panel manufacturing company, this rule-of-thumb holds that solar-panel prices drop 20% with each doubling of the industry.

That’s still not enough to let everyone live like Parrott and Iwahashi – their home-energy system is affordable only because of the fortuitous mix of California sunshine, tax breaks, and the state’s buy–sell law that allows them to take advantage of the difference between peak and off-peak rates. But the day is drawing nearer when solar might be able to stand on its own. According to data collected by energy market research group Bloomberg New Energy Finance, solar cell prices have fallen by a factor of more than 100 since 1997.

THE OTHER PRIMARY solar energy technology is CSP. The concept is simple… and ancient. As far back as 213 or 214 BC, Archimedes reputedly used the same principle to set fire to invading warships by having the defenders of his city focus sunlight on the ships using handheld mirrors. Modern attempts to replicate this feat have cast doubt on whether it was truly possible with the technology of his era, but the theory is well established. It’s the same one used by scouts the world over to start a fire with a magnifying glass or construct a solar oven for baking bread. With a large enough array of mirrors, CSP technology can be ramped up sufficiently to build large power plants that could replace their fossil-fuel counterparts. The only thing that’s different is the source of heat.

The hold-up comes from the combination of construction costs and thermodynamics. CSP ‘fuel’ – sunlight – is free, but the high-performance mirrors used to concentrate it are expensive. So to compete with fossil fuels, CSP plants need to be more efficient. That, in turn, requires temperatures at the focus to be quite hot.

“Thermodynamic theory says that if you increase operating temperature, you increase efficiency,” says Stein. In theory, the solution is simple: just focus the heat more intensely. But it turns out that if you do this, things start to burn up like Archimedes’s invading warships – not literally, but chemically, as the heat takes a toll on turbine blades and pipes.

One solution is to wait for metallurgists to develop alloys that can better withstand extreme conditions. Another is to make the turbine more efficient without changing the temperature – a boon not only to CSP, but also to existing fossil-fuel plants. Current turbines use two ‘cycles’ for tapping heat for electricity. Steam turbines boil water, then use the expanding steam to spin the turbine blades. Unfortunately, they lose large amounts of energy in the process of converting the steam back to water for the next cycle. Gas turbines bypass this by using hot gases that never have to be re-liquified, but lose comparable amounts of energy by having to re-compress the gas at the start of each cycle.

An alternative that’s drawing increasing attention is using supercritical carbon dioxide instead of water or gas – which, like the materials used in existing turbine cycles, is continuously reused, not released into the atmosphere to contribute to global warming. A supercritical fluid is a substance normally thought of as a gas, held at a combination of high temperatures and pressures that give it the characteristics of both a gas and a liquid. Since it doesn’t have to be re-liquified after each cycle, there’s no energy lost. Nor is there any need to waste energy re-compressing it.

The result might be a 25% to 35% increase in efficiency. “The coal, nuclear and CSP industries are all starting to look at that cycle,” Stein says, though the greatest benefits might be to CSP because it has the highest-cost source of energy, due to the expense of the mirrors.

Shifting to supercritical carbon dioxide can also be done at temperatures common for conventional steam or gas turbines. “You need only 700°C to 800°C, and that’s pretty doable with the metals available today,” Stein says.

WHAT WILL THE energy world of 2063 look like? “Who knows? There may be things we can’t even envision,” says Alan Krupnick, environmental and resource economist with Resources for the Future, a think tank based in Washington, DC. He lists hydrogen fuel cells, and improved battery technology “because that’s a possible game-changer”. But it’s just as likely the mix will be much like 2013’s – including wind, nuclear, biomass and old-fashioned fossil fuel.

Wind is the poster child for alternative-energy success. Every summer day, in America’s Pacific Northwest, a parade of giant trucks heads out along the freeway from Portland, Oregon, carrying giant pylons and turbine blades into the sagebrush steppes of the eastern Columbia River Gorge, which funnels gale-force winds from the Pacific Ocean into the inland desert. In Oregon, wind power already accounts for around 10% of electrical needs. Other places have done even better. In Spain, wind energy now supplies 16% of national electricity demand. In Denmark, it’s more than 25%.

Australia currently lags at just 2%, says Jonathan Whale, a wind-energy researcher at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. But wind farms, he says, will be the nation’s “go-to” form of renewable energy if it plans to meet its renewable energy target of 20% by 2020. And greater progress might come in the future, he says, if wind farms move offshore, where larger components can be brought in by barge.

Wind power has its disadvantages. Like solar, it’s fickle. There are two ways to deal with that. One is to interconnect numerous wind and solar plants onto a single large grid, thereby averaging out the fluctuations. But that can make one city’s power dependent on another region’s weather. If the wind changes dramatically in the Baltic (where much of Europe’s wind power is generated) the electricity supply in the Czech Republic becomes unstable, notes Mason. “And they’re a pretty long way from where the wind is.”

The other solution is to find ways to store energy for later use. When most people think of storing electrical power, they think of batteries. But at gigawatt levels these would be enormous, and absurdly expensive. A better way to do it, says Stein, is through “thermal storage” – a method that’s particularly appealing for heat-based generators such as CSP facilities.

This works by storing excess heat in well-insulated vaults of… well, anything hot. Ideally, the material would also be dense, so it wouldn’t require vats the size of supertankers to hold enough of it. “Molten salt is an example,” says Stein. “Nearly all of the CSP projects in Spain and the U.S. are integrating molten salt storage. When the clouds come over, or it’s night-time, you use the heat to generate steam.”

Another way of storing energy would be via thermochemistry, in which excess heat is used to drive high-energy chemical reactions uphill – that is, in the direction in which energy is added, rather than released. “So, you store the energy as chemical energy rather than straight-out heat,” Stein says. One advantage, he notes, is that you can store energy that way indefinitely. “You don’t have to worry about heat leaking out.”

Similar chemical processes can be used to produce solar fuels. In the early 2000s, there was much talk of a hydrogen economy in which hydrogen fuel cells replace petrol. Hydrogen does have a major advantage in that it’s pollution-free. When you burn it, the only byproduct is water. There’s just one problem: hydrogen is a beast to handle. It’s explosive. Its tiny molecules easily permeate out of storage containers. It can turn pipeline metals brittle. And to use it in a car, you need to either liquefy it or compress it, either of which takes a lot of energy.

Better, argues Ellen Stechel, deputy director of Lightworks, a solar-power project at Arizona State University in Tempe, is to take that hydrogen, and produce something easier to use – such as solar-derived petrol. Stechel’s work grew out of an interest in finding ways to make synthetic aviation fuels, other than via biofuels (fuels derived from biomass), which cannot be generated in sufficient quantities to power the world if we still want to grow crops to eat.

But nobody’s going to make a commercially feasible, electric jetliner in the near future. Even electric cars have their disadvantages. No matter how cheap batteries become, the ones we have don’t recharge quickly and their weight reduces energy efficiency except in cars used solely for short-range commuting.

“The fuels we use today have really nice properties,” Stechel says, “high-energy density both by mass and volume.” They are also very convenient. “We can fuel very fast, whether it’s a big truck, an airplane, or a car. You can’t do that with hydrogen and you can’t do that with electricity.”

There’s also an advantage to using fuels we are already equipped to handle. “We have an enormous amount of infrastructure,” she says.

There are several ways to make such fuels from air, water, and sunlight, but Stechel’s focus is via CSP. If sunlight is focussed on a metal oxide, such as zinc or tin oxide, that oxide will give up its oxygen. In a reaction chamber, once this is cooled back down and exposed to a mix of steam and carbon dioxide, the metal atoms will “steal back the oxygen”, Stechel says, producing the original metal oxide (ready for reuse), plus carbon monoxide and hydrogen: “building blocks to make any hydrocarbon you like”. It’s not a far-out technology. “We believe it could be pushed to market in about a decade,” she says.

In the interim, it might be possible to make solar-hybrid fuels. These start with a fossil-fuel source, then add solar energy to make that fuel even better. An example, says Stein, is using solar energy to split natural gas into syngas – the same combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide Stechel’s group is looking at making into pure solar fuels. “The solar-energy proportion is only 20% or 30%,” Stein says, but it’s a starting point. “Without even knowing it, consumers would be using solar energy.”

MORE PROBLEMATIC is the role of nuclear power. “My personal feeling is that we are suffering from a massive case of ‘Fukushima shock’,” says Krupnick. He’s referring to the Japanese reactor that, in the wake of a 2011 earthquake and tsunami, produced the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. It hasn’t helped, he adds, that ‘fracking’ technology, where high-pressure steam is used to fracture rock strata and release trapped gas reserves previously believed to be unobtainable, has produced a new boom in fossil-fuel production. “With low natural gas prices, there’s just no interest in nuclear.”

Mason believes the nuclear future (if we let it happen) will belong to small modular reactors and generation III nuclear plants. Small reactors are just that. They’re placed underground and produce 50 to 300 megawatts of power, which is far less than the thousands of megawatts derived from current reactors – more like the reactors long used on submarines and aircraft carriers. Because they’re smaller and underground, they’re safer, especially because they don’t need to keep large supplies of fuel on hand.

Generation III reactors are designed to be more failsafe than their predecessors. For example, the cooling system might be in a gravity-fed reservoir on the roof of the containment building. Cooling water would flow into the reactor via gravity, then heat to steam that would rise back to the roof, where it would cool and condense back into water for the next cooling cycle. The entire system is a continuous, passive loop relying only on the fact that water flows downhill and steam rises. “That’s a passive safety feature,” Mason says. “There is no need for operators or pumps.”

Another improvement, Mason says, is the use of “accident-tolerant fuels”. He says old-style fuels were encapsulated in zirconium alloys, which had the advantage of not absorbing neutrons (an impediment to reactor performance) but that, when overheated, cause water to disassociate into hydrogen and oxygen – the source of the explosion behind the Fukushima accident.

New-generation fuels are encapsulated in materials that don’t have this property. “If something happens and the system heats up, you don’t compound the problem by having this release of hydrogen,” Mason says. “It gives you a much greater safety margin.”

There’s more on the drawing board to massively reduce the quantities of nuclear waste, while increasing the efficiency of fuel. One of these is fuel recycling. “In the current fuel cycle, it’s only a [small] percentage of the potential energy that you’ve really used,” Mason says. “That means the waste volume per unit energy is large. You can do a whole lot better.”

One option is the breeder reactor, known since the 1940s, in which uranium-238 (which comprises 99% of natural uranium, but isn’t usable as reactor fuel) is converted to plutonium-239, an artificial, usable fuel. Another is the thorium fuel cycle, which converts thorium-232 into uranium-233, which doesn’t occur in nature but is a perfectly usable fuel source. “Because thorium is more abundant than uranium, there’s been renewed interest in this,” Mason says.

With these approaches, he adds, all of the world’s electricity could be generated from nuclear sources. But he continues, “I’m not sure that would be valuable or desirable. There’s a value in diversity of energy supply. I’m not sure you would want to put all your eggs in one basket.”

Nor does he expect fusion power to suddenly step up and fill the clean-energy gap, even in the next 50 years. “You
might hope that by the end of that timeframe, you’ve answered the scientific questions and are beginning to answer the engineering problems,” he says.

WHAT THIS MEANS is that the future will need a mix of energy facilities: centralised and decentralised – residential, commercial and industrial.

Few of the likely changes, however, will come quickly. Your mobile phone might be obsolete in two years, your laptop in five, but power plants are vastly more expensive, and designed to operate for decades. “The energy industry is very conservative and generally working with technologies that have 20, 30 or 40-plus-year asset lives,” says Stein.

Mason agrees. “Fifty years sounds like a long time, when you think about healthcare and information technology. But in ‘energy space’ 50 years is not very long. If you look at the time it’s taken for previous transitions – nuclear power, petroleum, before that, coal – each took half a century, and in some cases longer. You’re talking about capital investments that persist for 50-year timeframes. It can’t happen fast because the system has so much inertia in it.”

What this means is that new technologies may infiltrate the present power-generation system, but fossil fuels are likely to continue in use for a long time, at least until today’s plants wear out.

If more rapid shifts do occur, Stein says, they will probably be driven by climate change. “We just had a fairly severe heat wave on the east coast of Australia,” he says, “and we’re getting significant, abnormal climate events around the world. If something did happen, where significant heating led to significant drought that led to significant socionomic change, we could see a drastic acceleration in the move to these new technologies. But if it’s business as usual, you’ll probably wind up with a slow shift.”

If change does happen slowly, our lives may not be all that radically affected. “Ultimately, I don’t see that lifestyle should be affected,” Stein says. “If we do these technologies correctly, the consumer should not see any difference when they turn the switch or start their car. They should still get their electricity. They should still get from A to B in their vehicle. There should not be any noticeable effect at the end of the day except that, perhaps, the climate is cleaner.”

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THE AUSTRALIAN SPECULATIVE fiction (an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy and related genres) community is small but perfectly formed. At Conflux 9, writers, artists, editors, publishers and fans mingled on largely equal footing. It’s Australia’s 52nd such convention, and the ninth in Canberra. Held from 25 to 28 April 2013 with some 270 attendees, it offered insights into the hearts of the genre and its people.

A window into humanity

According to Melbourne-based writer Claire McKenna, “science fiction is technology as a metaphor for the human condition”, and numerous panels explored such themes. ‘Am I not human?’ flitted between discussion of humanity’s biological basis, whether Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was more human than some of the ‘real’ people he encountered, and whether we’ll remain human as we continue to outsource our brains to Google. Here was literature as a window into the depths of psychology – relationships, body horror and fear of mortality.

Fear of death is a recurring theme, reappearing on a panel on ‘The ethics of immortality’. Panellists examined why people desire immortality and the costs of never dying. What might it mean for the planet – or even for science, with the suggestion that it might take one obsessive scientist a hundred years to cure cancer. The consequences of uploading yourself: How many copies should you make? Will you still be human? In place of answers, we had book suggestions; Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and Iain Banks’s The Hydrogen Sonata were two of many.

The once and future genre

A panel on ‘What was great about SF when we were young?’ explored the genre’s future as well as its past. A recurring contention was the notion that science fiction is being displaced by fantasy because we are now living in the technological future of our past. But science fiction (in concert with science itself) is still our best guidebook for the future, and as such retains its value.

In later discussion, Perth-based librarian Grant Stone agreed, noting that Hugo Gernsback included science fiction in his science magazine in the early 20th century because he realised that it was a “nexus to keep the brain active and agile, and thinking about the potential for the future”, and was the only way prepare for the future and turn ideas to reality.

Optimism about the industry was obvious. “This is the most exciting time to be writing science fiction – or any speculative fiction – in Australia; it’s just booming here at the moment,” said Sean Williams, a writer based in Adelaide. “You can tell by walking around Conflux – the number of published authors has got to be at an all-time high.” Stone agreed, and pointed out that there’s quality as well as quantity. “I’ve never been to a con with so many book launches,” he exulted. “The literature is being raised to such a standard, and being praised by people who know. It’s a very healthy time.”

Publisher and editor Russell Farr, of Perth-based Ticonderoga Publications, noted that “people with good science knowledge can write amazing things”, but that Australian sci-fi writers tend to be snapped up by large publishers, mainly overseas, perhaps giving an impression that the nation produces less science fiction. He also pointed to a culture less likely to venerate science and its achievements: “We don’t put up statues of scientists, despite being proud of the things Australians invent. But our science fiction writers put us on the world stage first – people like Greg Egan, Damien Broderick, A. Bertram Chandler.”

We the people

Conflux 9 might have brimmed over with ideas, but the people expressing these thoughts and drinking them in were what made the event. Co-chairperson and writer Donna Maree Hanson noted that what struck her when she was new to conventions was the egalitarian feel; at these events, writers, publishers and fans mix freely at the bar and elsewhere, discussing big ideas and sharing knowledge as friends and colleagues. “Some of us only get to see each other once a year,” writer and COSMOS fiction editor Cat Sparks said. “It’s like a family reunion.”

Con highlights

* On the first evening, COSMOS fiction editor’s first short story collection, The Bride Price, was launched by Sean Williams to a packed-out room. By early accounts, it’s a dark collection of science fiction and some fantasy.

* The Ditmars award ceremony, which featured real-time Lego building, and cheeky hosting and live tweeting.

* The sense of home felt while in a panel where most panellists and audience members seemed to know every Doctor Who episode by heart.

* Some confusion about the difference between science and science fiction – from other hotel guests.

Old fella in the bar: Bloody busy in here. Me: Yeah, sorry. It’s the National Science Fiction Convention. Him: Bloody scientists! #Conflux9

— AlanBaxter (@AlanBaxter) April 27, 2013

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It’s early January 2013, and these experts from across the globe have come to Australia’s southerly island state for a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Hobart’s weather generally tends toward mild and damp; cold winds from Antarctica regularly bring snow to the rocky peak of nearby Mount Wellington. Over the past century or so, the city’s average January maximum has been just 21°C.

Yet, during the previous week, Hobart had experienced its hottest day on record, with the temperature soaring above 40°C. Instead of clouds, the sky was wreathed in smoke. In the nearby fishing village of Dunalley, 80 homes, some 30% of the town, were destroyed by bushfires. Hundreds of residents were evacuated by boat from the Tasman Peninsula.

The scientists are here to help finalise sections of the IPCC’s latest and massively complex assessment report, the fifth such mammoth document released over the past 25 years. Part of their job is to outline the range of possible future climates humanity can expect over the coming decades.

A few weeks earlier, a draft version of the report was leaked on a blog by a climate sceptic who was also one of the experts engaged in the review process. The report is due to be released in three stages, beginning in September 2013, and wording may change. As it is, the draft suggests that 50 years from now, average surface air temperatures could be between 1°C and 2°C warmer than they were in the early 2000s. This is on top of a warming of about 0.8°C already recorded since the Industrial Revolution.

Other organisations have released more worrying forecasts. In November 2012, a report for the World Bank compiled by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany warned that, if governments fail to meet current mitigation pledges and commitments, the average global temperature could rise 4°C above pre-industrial temperatures by as early as the 2060s. In line with the IPCC, most of the experts I spoke with for this story said while this kind of hike was possible, by mid century, rises of the order of 1°C or 2°C were more likely, with further increases to follow.

Even this kind of rise approaches a level of warming that governments agree would risk dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. During a coffee break at the Hobart meeting I chatted with Andy Pitman, a climate modeller who directs the ARC Centre for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. A straight-talking man, he’s more than a little exasperated as he explains that much of the fundamental understanding of climate science is settled.

“There is zero disagreement over whether the Earth will warm if we continue to put nine billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year,” he says. “That’s just not up for discussion, which is why we find the debates with the sceptics so tedious. It’s like arguing the toss over whether the average car has four wheels or not.”

As the scientists begin filing back into their meeting rooms, I ask Pitman how likely we are to stay under the 2°C limit this century. “We’ve got,” he answers quickly, “a snowball’s chance in hell”.

A WEEK AFTER THE meeting, I arrange to meet Pitman for a longer talk. He makes me coffee and ushers me into the sort of office that could easily belong to a historian or psychiatrist. Pitman’s experiments take place not in a lab but amid millions of lines of computer code. He uses elaborate climate models to help pose the question: what is our climate future? Based on fundamental laws of physics, these models work at grid-level scales, using a 3-D array of ‘cells’ of regional zones to artificially generate all the complexities of a climate system: the swirling clouds and flooding rivers, dynamic oceans and polar ice caps. These cells and all their variables – including data on the rate of change of temperature, humidity, and the flow of energy in and out of the system – are enmeshed in mathematical relationships played out in supercomputers.

I ask him how these models work on a practical level. “We take the Earth as a sphere, and break it up into a chessboard pattern, and up into multiple levels – like the 3-D chessboard Spock plays on in Star Trek,” he explains. The model maps the climate now and mathematically predicts the next step of progress – perhaps just half an hour later – to see how the whole system changes. The model then solves the equations again for the next half hour – and so on, for however long he wants it to run. Just one of these simulations might take six to nine months in real time, and the output is a mathematical representation of the entire globe, inscribed in perhaps a million gigabytes of data.

Scientific groups around the world operate different versions of these virtual worlds. When several of their models agree, scientists can state with what level of confidence – statistically speaking – they can be sure their model is correct in its predictions. Where more models agree, there’s more certainty.

Among the most certain repercussions of a warming climate is that extremely hot days will become more frequent. So when the Tasmanian emergency services minister reassured Hobart residents that the bushfires of 2013 were the result of catastrophic weather conditions that occur “once in a generation”, he was making an assertion that may not still be true 50 years from now.

In climate terms, 50 years isn’t that far into the future. Chris Field, founding director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California, says much of the change we can expect over the next five decades is already in train.

“We’re looking now at consequences of things that have already been baked into the system, consequences of emissions that have already occurred,” he says. “Even if we started tomorrow with aggressive emissions reductions, it would only mean a few per cent difference the first year and a few more for the second year and so on.” Some of the consequences of today’s emissions won’t even have kicked in by mid century, he adds.

IN THE MIDDLE OF a hot spell in Sydney in the southern summer, when temperatures in the mid 40s have forced many folks into shopping malls and cinemas for relief, I call Lisa Alexander, an expert in extreme weather events at the Climate Change Research Centre at the UNSW, to discuss what ramifications global warming could have over the next 50 years.

“What we consider today to be an extreme of temperature, that’s going to become the norm by the middle of the century,” she says. “The sort of temperatures we’ve had in Sydney this week, rather than happening once in a summer, will start to occur a lot more often.”

In November 2011, consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia compiled a report for the Australian Government, looking specifically at the question of extreme events. “By 2050, an extreme heat event in Melbourne alone could typically kill over one thousand people in a few days if we don’t improve the way we forecast, prepare for and manage these events,” it warned. For Victorian residents who lived through the ‘Black Saturday’ fires in 2009, when drought and temperatures over 45°C led to 173 people dying in bushfires, these are alarming words.

It’s not only Australia that will see these kinds of extreme events more often. By the middle of the century, extreme highs will become more common across the globe, according to a special report released by the IPCC in March 2012. Temperatures historically hit once every 20 years could become 10 times more common in some places. Nearly everywhere on the planet will be hit by heatwaves, says Alexander. Europeans learned the impact such events could have in 2003, when an estimated 70,000 people died during the hottest summer on record since 1540.

AS THE TEMPERATURE rises, it will disrupt patterns of rainfall and snowfall, making heavy downfalls more common on a global scale. Trying to predict what will happen to rainfall at a regional level in the next 50 years is harder. “Broadly, we could say the wet places will get wetter and the dry places will get drier,” Alexander says. “But there are quite a few places where we’re not getting the majority of models agreeing on what will happen in individual regions.” Other areas could change from wet to dry, or vice versa, she says.

In China, for example, “data indicate that some of the traditionally dry areas will actually become slightly wetter, and in some of the relatively wet areas, the precipitation will be reduced,” says Yiqi Luo, co-director of the Fudan Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Shanghai.

Heavy downpours could mean an increased risk of flooding in some areas, perhaps similar to the floods that turned three quarters of the Australian state of Queensland into a disaster zone in 2010. On the other hand, changing rainfall patterns could also lead to an increased risk of drought. The climate change report for the World Bank estimated that a 2°C increase in global average temperatures could cut annual runoff by 20% to 40% in vital river basins such as the Amazon, the Mississippi and the Murray–Darling, while increasing runoff by around 20% in the Nile and the Ganges.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, changes in rainfall patterns and temperatures will also have an impact on the risk of forest fires by 2063, scientists say. In Amazonia, for example, the World Bank report estimates that forest fires could as much as double by 2050 with warming of approximately 1.5°C to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures are also expected to raise sea levels, by melting glaciers and polar ice caps and causing ocean water to expand. The oceans have an enormous capacity to absorb the warming caused by rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, and the rise in sea levels is expected to happen slowly, explains John Church, a lead IPCC author from Australia’s national research agency CSIRO. “By 2063, there would be a growing but at this time relatively small impact on sea level change,” he says. He estimates a rise of about 20 to 50 cm from the sea level in 2000.

It’s long been postulated that climate change will also cause more severe storms. “It’s really the intensity of the cyclone that’s the problem, rather than the frequency,” says Alexander. “If you get low-category cyclones, they’re much less of a problem than if you get the large, intense cyclones.”

The costs of such an increase could be enormous. In 2012, the costliest natural catastrophe for the U.S. insurance industry was Hurricane Sandy, which caused overall losses that giant insurer Munich Re put at US$50 billion including in excess of US$25 billion in insured losses. And as Munich Re pointed out in January 2013, recent years have already seen a “strong upward trend in insured losses” related to thunderstorms in the USA.

Yet the cost of Hurricane Sandy could pale in comparison to the trillions of dollars required for coastal defences to protect cities from rising sea levels. “If there is half a metre of sea level rise, followed by 1 m, then, for sure, most of China’s major cities along the coast regions will be affected,” says Luo. “In China, 80% of people live in relatively low elevation areas in coastal regions.”

FOR ALMOST TWO DECADES, Nick Rowley has had a ringside seat to the bruising politics of climate change. In recent years, the British policy consultant has advised companies and governments on sustainability. Before that, he was a climate advisor to New South Wales premier Bob Carr, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Over that time, Rowley says, he has watched climate experts become resigned to the inevitability of dangerous climate change. “When I was working with Tony Blair seven years ago, there was a level of energy and focus among scientists, advocates and policy professionals addressing the problem.”

Today, that enthusiasm and motivation has been lost, he says. “Their tone is one of accepting that this world is going to change fundamentally over the coming 50 years because of the climate problem.”

Rowley is far from alone in that dismal assessment. David Karoly, a senior climate change researcher at the University of Melbourne, worries that meaningful political action will come about only when the gradual accumulation of disaster upon disaster – floods on fires on ‘Frankenstorms’ – make it impossible for the status quo to continue.

“For there to be a switch from political inaction to political action, there will have to be some very, very major climate-related disasters,” he says. “Many people will call those cataclysmic.” Karoly’s guess is that political change will start happening around 15 years from now. “But my view is that emissions won’t start to fall until 2050.”

An important part of that delay is the economic commitments countries are making right now to build coal-fired power stations. “It’s a kind of inertia that’s really important for the global economy,” says Field. “If we have to start retiring power plants that are only half their retirement age, or 10% of their retirement age, then we’re imposing both the early retirement costs and the extra costs of the renewables. And that’s when it starts getting really expensive.”

IN THIS VERSION OF 2063’s climate, “survival and adaptation would be the name of the game”, says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “It would be a world on the edge of despair… but people would still feel they can adapt. A world that would be manageable, but there would still be heavy losses.”

Adaptation would be one priority: adjusting the way we organise our lives, cities and industries to cope with the changed conditions. Another would be fighting to minimise more disruptive change. By 2063, simply cutting emissions may not be enough to achieve this. Indeed, by the middle of the century the world may well have already dabbled with various technological fixes to try to cool the Earth and strip carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

“I think the key point is that we will face continuing impacts and will face even worse impacts after we’ve realised that the problem needs to be solved,” says Field. There are profound issues with the gamut of geoengineering concepts aiming to mitigate climate change, he says. “If we want to know how well any of those things are going to work, and especially how well they are going to scale, we should be studying them real hard, right now.”

The kind of radical schemes that can garner headlines – shielding the Earth from sunlight with giant mirrors in space, or with reflective aerosols in the upper atmosphere – may have been tested at smaller scales, but most have failed or been banned because they are too expensive or risky, says Schellnhuber. “Solar radiation management is dangerous nonsense.”

Field, Schellnhuber, Karoly and others are more optimistic that over the next 50 years we will get better at capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power stations, or from the atmosphere itself. Some of the most promising approaches are a return to natural mechanisms, says Schellnhuber. “I would say the natural method of geoengineering would be best: planting trees.” Maintenance of tropical forests and bans on land clearing would also help reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.

Others think these natural approaches will not be enough and that new technologies will also be needed, some of which may already be on the horizon. In Queensland, for example, a pilot scheme by Australian energy company MBD Energy uses algae to capture carbon dioxide emissions from a power station in the town of Tarong, northwest of Brisbane, and grow feedstock. And in July 2012, global tech company Panasonic said it had developed a relatively efficient artificial photosynthesis system to convert carbon dioxide into fuels.

Fifty years from now, humanity is bound to have tools at its disposal that are just as unimaginable as smartphones and the Internet were in 1963. In predicting the future of climate change, “I think one of the weaknesses we often see is an expectation that in 50 years people are going to be using the same technology we have now,” says Field. “It’s interesting, when you look at 1963, some things have not really changed at all… but other things have changed drastically.”

IF THE CLIMATE OF 2063 does change substantially, it is unlikely to yet be enough to threaten civilisation, or usher in widespread ecosystem destruction. It is likely, however, that both temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations will keep rising for another 50 years or more. “We could go to a 3°C increase over current levels by 2100,” says Schellnhuber.

By this time, seas could be a metre higher than they were before the industrial revolution, says Karoly. By 2150, a 2 m rise is possible. If this comes to pass, hundreds of millions of people could be displaced.

The scientists I spoke with worry that the citizens of 2063 will rue our failure to act on climate change today. “Sadly, in 2063 people are likely to look back at this generation and be damning of it,” says Rowley. “They will say that on the basis of the evidence presented to you, by the very best minds who have devoted their lives to understanding this complexity, you as societies were not willing to make the decisions and implement the policies to reduce the climate risks and costs that we now endure.”

After a couple of hours chatting with Pitman, our conversation takes a turn in the same direction. In 2063, he points out, it will be our children and grandchildren left to deal with the consequences of climate change. “I think they will look back and curse the current generation of political leaders. One of the cruel realities is that every one of those leaders will be dead, and not be held accountable.”

Stephen Pincock is a science journalist, editor and author and a regular COSMOS contributor.

The post Another day in paradise appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

But Prabhjit’s next morning ritual is different. Moving into the living room, she passes her henna-tattooed hand over a picture of her 15-year-old daughter. Apoorva’s image dissolves and eight farm grids sprout onto the screen, their colours every bit as vivid as Prabhjit’s sari. Her practised eye homes in on the scarlet dots – in-field sensors, sitting among the crops like tiny one-eyed metal scarecrows – that alert her to two patches on the northwest corner that are in distress. They’ll need a little more water. Then she zooms out to scan the satellite data from the entire area of Odisha state in eastern India. Some other farms have already begun their harvest; Prabjit begins ruminating about the implications. But the sound of an alarm clock pushes these thoughts to the back of her mind. Time for Apoorva to get ready for school.

IT’S 8 AM, AND PRABHJIT is sitting in front of her data screen in the small office to the side of her living room. Her husband has taken their daughter to the village high school, and himself to the office; he is the chief hydraulic engineer at Ganjam city council. Prabhjit calls her foreman to tell him to increase the flow rate in the drippers for fields NW1 and NW2. He also needs to service the rice harvester ahead of next weeks’ harvest, and while he’s at it, the rice-transplanter and tractors, to ready them for leasing to her neighbours. She arranges to meet him for an onsite visit at 11 am.

There’s a knock at her door. It’s expected – the two-monthly visit from Anil, her ‘ag-service’ provider. She puts on a pot of chai and asks politely about Anil’s family before they move on to some local gossip. Who’s planting what, what are the pests like, and what’s his take on the market? Then she steers the conversation to rice. Anil confirms what she already knows. Some farmers have started to harvest a bumper crop. But her crop needs another week to reach its peak. With plenty of rice on offer, will she get still get a good price? Or should she store her rice? Prabhjit weighs Anil’s opinions, and decides to silo her harvest in the village granary and wait for the price to rise.

Then they chat about vegetables. Prabhjit’s three-year contract for lentils and eggplants with the Bhubaneshwar grocery store is about to run out. Again, she gently questions Anil to find out what sorts of deals are being made. She decides to renew her contract, but on Anil’s advice will try the latest variety of Ganesh BT+ eggplant, with its promise of a four-week shelf life.

Anil taps his briefcase, prompting a holographic display of the latest upgrade for satellite and field data. Prabjit can’t resist and signs up. At 10.30 am, she heads to her meeting with the foreman. As she emerges from the cool of her rice husk-cement composite home, the Sun is beating down hard. She unplugs her car from the socket and eases herself into the drivers’ seat… just in time to receive a call from her mother. After inquiring whether Apoorva remembered her morning prayers, Prabjit’s mother reminds her that tomorrow is the anniversary of her grandmother’s death – she and Apoorva should light a special incense stick. Prabhjit signs off a little abruptly. Yes mother – I need to meet with the foreman now. Talk to you later.

Prabhjit had intended to spend the 10-minute trip planning her conversation with the foreman. But as she cruises down the paved road, an unbidden image projects itself onto the swaying green fields on either side of the car. Shin-deep in a muddy paddy, Grandmother and Mother (then just 12 years old) are bent over, shuffling backwards. They are in the Punjab, far from home, labourers in a team of women who spend day after day poking rice seedlings into the mud. Weeks later they will make their way back home, exhausted, huddled under blankets waiting at the foggy, smoke-filled train station in Ludhiana.

Another image replaces this one. Grandmother and Mother are transplanting rice again, but this time it is their own paddy. And this time it is a special crop; it will change their future.

GRANDMOTHER MAY NOT have been able to read, but she could sense the winds of change. Her husband had long ago left the farm to work at a brick factory: the tiny payment the government broker provided for their rice harvest wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Yet, the government was urging farmers in Odisha to plant more rice because the wells of the Punjab, as everyone knew, were running dry. Odisha was usually blessed with ample rain, but there could be drought. Or floods. Both had struck in the year before Grandfather left.

One year, Grandmother was given some seeds when she attended a meeting at the village. The government woman in her fine blue silk sari had explained that the seeds, which had been developed in the Philippines and were called Sub1, were very strong. If a drought came, the seedlings would not shrivel up. And if the floods came, they would extend their tips, reaching up like tiny mouths above the water to breathe.

As Grandmother and Mother transplanted each seedling, they held it as tenderly as if it were a leaf of gold. Their efforts paid off: that first year, the floodwaters covered their crop for two weeks, but the crop had not drowned and, unlike many of the other farmers in Odisha, they had made a nice profit. Three years later, Grandmother went to another meeting. This time, the lady in the fine sari introduced her to a new type of rice – she said it was the daughter of Sub1. But this daughter was ‘smarter’ than her mother, so they called it Super Sub1. Not only would this plant survive drought and flood, but it could also extract phosphate from the soil, so Grandmother would not have to spend so much on costly fertiliser.

Grandmother’s profit rose steadily each year. She decided that, just as Super Sub1 was smarter than its predecessor, her daughter would be smarter than her. She could have put the profits toward her daughter’s dowry as her husband and his family had told her to. But she didn’t. Against their thundering disapproval she used the money to send her daughter to the agricultural college in Bhubaneshawar – the first of her family ever to finish high school, was now being sent for a college degree! Grandmother simply closed her ears to the cries that her daughter would never marry.

They were wrong. Mother married a man she met at the college. While looking after her babies, she also managed the farm accounts and read farming journals, sharing the latest news with father while the family feasted on her delicious curry and chapati. Prabhjit grew up hearing the story of the smart rice that had paid for Mother to go to college.

In Prabhjit’s teens, the winds of fortune brought more changes. One was the land reform. A new law allowed the formation of small farming corporations, up to 40 hectares in size. Prabhjit’s father took his two hectares and joined up with Grandmother’s two. It wasn’t hard to rent more blocks – many of the families had moved to the city, leaving their old folk to work the paddies. It took years to finalise the negotiations; Prabhjit recalled Father tearing his hair and moaning: “It’s just molasses, this Indian bureaucracy.” By the time she graduated from college, Father left the running of the farm to her. She took a loan on microcredit to build up the farm to its present 24 hectares – and took the wheel.

THE OTHER REVOLUTION for Prabhjit was the genetically modified seed that allowed rice to ‘fix’ its own nitrogen from the Earth. She recalled her parents’ eyes glowing as they told her about it. Like Super Sub1, this was a very clever seed. A worldwide project, funded by the legendary Lord Bill and Lady Melinda Gates, had taken nearly 50 years to develop it. As Mother loved telling the wide-eyed young Prabhjit, “these rice grains are the children of Lord Lakshmi, benevolent goddess of light, and Vishnu, the restorer”. When Prabhjit reached high school, her mother gave her the scientific explanation. The rice plants had been genetically engineered to carry the powerful photosynthetic engine of a corn plant. But they also carried the nitrogen-fixing genes of a legume. Truly magical plants, they produced rice grains that were double the size using half the amount of fertiliser.

Vegetable seeds improved too: eggplants, cauliflowers, cabbages like the family had never seen. Best of all, they could throw away the most toxic pesticides because these seeds produced their own pesticides borrowed from the genes of a species of bacteria known as Bacillus thuringiensis, or BT for short. These vegetables were so powerful at resisting pests and raising profits, they earned the name ‘Ganesh’ after the elephant-headed son of Shiva, who was also the god of good fortune. Mother said they could have had Ganesh seeds years before. She never understood why the government delayed them; BT cotton had already saved millions of cotton farmers from pesticide poisoning and raised their yields. And BT was so safe, it was the stock-in-trade for organic farmers who sprayed the bacteria directly on their plants.

Prabhjit never forgot that gleam in her parents’ eyes. And she never forgot Grandmother. She passed away when Prabhjit was 20; a shrunken 57-year-old. Now, not so far from that age herself, the realisation shook her. Grandmother withered from the backbreaking work planting rice and spraying pesticides from a perforated spout of two tin cans yoked across her neck, barefoot. She had told Prabhjit how they would come back from the spraying, sick with headaches and shakes. In her final years, she still suffered from them. Lying on pillows on the cot, she told Prabhjit her stories; the ending was always the same. Prabhjit clearly heard Grandmother’s voice: “You will be like the rice grains that grow smarter in each generation.” Grandmother, I will light the incense stick for you tomorrow and I will tell you how smart I have become, Prabhjit answered silently.

* * * * * * * *
YOU MIGHT SAY Prabhjit’s story is a dream. And you’d be right. It is the dream of plant pathologist Robert Zeigler, director of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines. It’s a dream that he has spent the best part of his career trying to turn into a reality. Many of Prabhjit’s farming tools are in the development pipeline, and some have already emerged.

The flood- and drought-tolerant rice variety (named Swarna Sub1 by IRRI researchers) is already available. The variety that can mine its own phosphate from the soil (referred to as Super Swarna Sub1) is due for release in the next couple of years. It carries a gene called PSTOL1, which IRRI breeders managed to isolate from a traditional Indian rice variety that performs well in soils with low phosphate levels. Both these new rice varieties were developed through a 20-year process of shuffling genes from semi-wild or old-fashioned farmers’ rice varieties into modern high-yielding ones by conventional breeding techniques.

The next cabs off the rank will take longer. Rice that can double its production by using the supercharged photosynthetic engine that naturally belongs to a corn plant is a tough ask – but one that’s on the cards, and known as the C4 rice project. It involves retrofitting a whole assembly line of corn genes and redesigning the infrastructure of the rice plant to accept them. Another very tough ask is to ferry the genes of a legume into a cereal grass such as rice, maize or wheat, enabling the plant to ‘fix’ its own nitrogen. A crop like this would truly usher in the next Green Revolution; doubling yields but using far less fertiliser than today’s rice requires. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, enamoured of bold challenges, is funding both projects.

What’s the chance of success? I ask Zeigler. “Undoubted,” he says. “When I proposed the flood- and drought-tolerant rice project 20 years ago, I was laughed off the stage. The tools we have now for genetically tweaking plants are vastly superior.”

Not all the tools that might be available to someone like Prabhjit come from the whiteboards of IRRI. The satellite from which she downloads data traces its origin to European Space Agency Sentinel satellites, the first of which is scheduled to launch in 2013, and whose microwave beams penetrate through clouds, meaning they can provide data about rice crops in Asia throughout the cloudy monsoon season. But IRRI is developing the software to enable farmers like Prabhjit to benefit. And it won’t just enable individual farmers to maximise their market opportunities – this type of data could help prevent a food price spike, says Zeigler. “With time to adjust to a shortage, they can import ahead of time, avoiding a panic.”

Prabhjit also uses drippers to irrigate and fertilise her fields. Punching tiny holes in tubing to deliver water and fertiliser at a slow rate more than halves a crop’s water requirements. Israeli inventor Daniel Hillel won the 2012 World Food Prize for developing it. Outside water-starved Israel, the fastest adopters to date have been China and India, countries that have increased their usage around 100-fold in the past 20 years.

In 2063, Prabhjit’s world is a happy place. By and large, the Malthusian spectre that haunted the world 50 years before – that the population would outgrow its food supply – failed to materialise. The challenge, then, was to feed an anticipated extra two billion mouths using existing agricultural lands. And it’s quite a challenge. In 2013, 38% of the world’s ice-free surface area is already under the yoke of agriculture, about a third of it for cropping, the rest for grazing. This land is also being lost to erosion and salty soils, smothered by roads, houses and golf courses; and chunks of it are being carved off to grow biofuels rather than food. Add to that the threats to agriculture from climate change, declining water supplies, flattening yields for wheat and rice, dwindling sources of phosphate, rising costs of nitrogen fertiliser, poor commercial incentives for farmers – and it’s clear why many are worried that the mid-21st century will be an age of mass famine.

But in Prabhjit’s world, mass starvation has been averted – and the ecological health of the planet is improving. In 2013, agriculture is the planet’s biggest polluter. Clearing chunks of the Amazon for farming (and losing carbon sinks), burning fossil fuels to make fertiliser (using up to 1% of the world’s energy); methane released by microbes fermenting in rice paddies and belching cows; and the nitrous oxide released by overuse of fertiliser, account for 35% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The same fertiliser running off fields into waterways causes algal overgrowths, sucking oxygen out of the mouths of the world’s major rivers and creating ‘dead zones’ for fish. This and overfishing threaten the imminent collapse of the world’s fisheries.

So can we address and remediate these problems? In October 2011, scientists led by Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, published a manifesto in Nature entitled ‘Solutions for a cultivated planet’. Foley’s group offered a five-point plan to feed the planet without destroying it (see ‘Saving the world‘).

As Foley concluded in an article in Scientific American published in November 2011: “Feeding nine billion people in a truly sustainable way will be one of the greatest challenges our civilisation has ever faced. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world. There is no time to lose.”

IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN the insight of farmers like Prabhjit’s grandmother to bring this vision to a reality. In the scenario painted here, Prabhjit is environmentally aware and government incentives encourage her to employ ‘best-practice’ techniques. For instance, she drains her fields at the midpoint of the growing season rather than the end because (as IRRI research shows) this dramatically reduces methane emissions. For her trouble, she receives a carbon credit.

Elsewhere, highly mechanised and automated megafarms are the order of the day. For a taste of what’s to come, take a look at the rain-fed wheat farms of Western Australia (WA), which stretch over tens of thousands of hectares. Here today, 500 horsepower, GPS-guided harvesters cut 25 m swathes of wheat, measuring the yield in each square metre as they go, and informing next season’s fertiliser requirements. Unskilled drivers simply need to tell the harvester to turn around when it gets to the end of the field. But it’s not hard to see an end to that requirement, says Mick Keogh, executive director of the Australian Farm Institute. Like the three-storey-high robot trucks that remotely mine the iron ore of WA, in 2063, robotic harvesters will dutifully bring in the wheat harvest.

Further north, like other countries with vast rangelands, Australia sports thriving cattle farms – because here, the beef and dairy cows graze on lands useless for cropping. Here again, genetic resources could herald a revolution. In 50 years’ time, the cows roaming the vast outback stations of Australia’s northwest won’t look terribly different, except for the tiny chips embedded in their necks to monitor their health and movements. But genetically they will be a breed apart. Improved methods of marking genes and the mapping of the cow genome will lead to breeds that easily withstand heat stress, thrive on grass and belch less methane. Meanwhile, pampered in their barns, healthy herds of dairy cows, freed of mastitis and other diseases of the past, are milked robotically, produce 50% more milk, and deliver a calf each year without birth complications.

Yes indeed, this version of 2063 is a happy place. But there is also a nightmare scenario that many experts fear is equally likely (see ‘The dark side’). Let’s hope the world instead follows Foley’s prescription. There is, indeed, no time to lose.

Elizabeth Finkel is the associate editor of COSMOS Magazine.

* * * * * * * *

SAVING THE WORLD
In 2011, a group of scientists published a bold five-point plan to meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs.

1 Stop expanding agriculture
Land that is now covered in tropical rainforest, which is being cleared at a rate of around 5–10 million hectares annually, offers little yield when converted to agriculture. Protecting this crucial carbon sink from slash and burn agriculture for quick gains requires economic incentives such as carbon credits and market certification.

2 Close the yield gap
By bringing under-performing farms in Central America, Africa, Asia and Europe up to speed with judicious use of fertiliser, irrigation and improved seed, Foley estimates that the yield of the world’s top 16 food crops could be increased by 58%.

3 Use resources more efficiently
Employ technologies such as drippers and so-called ‘precision agriculture’ where water and fertiliser are meted out in response to the day-to-day needs of the crop.

4 Eat less grain-fed beef
Thirty-five per cent of crops are grown to feed animals, but when it comes to beef this is a terribly wasteful use of food: every kilogram of deboned steak comes at the expense of 30 kg of grain.

5 Reduce waste
Roughly 30% of food is wasted. In affluent countries, it’s mostly left uneaten on the dinner plate; in poorer countries, food spoils in the fields or in silos. The solution is to reduce portion sizes and improve storage and distribution systems. Smartphones could also help farmers reduce losses. In the past, with their crop in danger of rotting in the field, farmers were hostage to middlemen. With smartphones, they’re free to search out the best price.

* * * * * * * *

THE DARK SIDE

Overuse of fertilisers and pesticides can wreak havoc on nearby ecosystems. Credit: iStockphoto

MANY EXPERTS think food production will keep pace with population growth. What they fear is what will be done to the environment to achieve it.

The worst-case scenario sees large chunks of existing farmlands lost to erosion, salinity and urban development. The Amazon Rainforest will be lost to agriculture, accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases. Farmers will be forced to use ever-higher levels of pesticides to control disease and pest outbreaks worsened by a cooking climate. Waterways polluted by fertiliser and pesticides will cause the collapse of fisheries.

There are plenty of factors conspiring towards this scenario. Despite rising food prices, farmers continue to operate on very slim margins, holding out for that fortunate year when they reap both a bumper crop and a good price. That means they need to keep their costs as low as possible, which means shortcuts. Richard Roush, dean of land and environment at the University of Melbourne frames this problem as “the tragedy of the commons”. Farmers focus on short-term individual gain rather than the long-term common good. It’s a predicament exacerbated by low food prices. Roush and colleagues at the University of California at Davis calculated that if farmers could charge just 10% more, they could afford to use the best environmental practices.

Fixing the economic settings for farmers is a global challenge. Take Australia’s biggest grain farmer, John Nicoletti – long an icon as a successful farmer–entrepreneur. In 2011, he owned 180,000 hectares. In January 2013, it was down to 142,000 hectares and he was angling to sell a further 81,000. “There’s just not enough money in the farming game anymore,” he told Farm Weekly.

Another source of alarm is the declining investment in public sector research – the driving force for technologies that would enable a small-scale farmer like Prabhjit to farm more productively with a smaller environmental footprint. Philip Pardey, agricultural economist and director of the International Science and Technology Practices and Policy Centre at the University of Minnesota, St Paul, is worried that countries such as the U.S. and Australia have cut spending on research and development. “Australia is in trouble,” he says. “Fifty years ago it ranked eighth in the world for R&D spending; now it’s 16th.” Pardy points out that it was the investments of 50 years ago that gave us the Green Revolution and averted the widespread famine predicted in the 1960s by ecologists like Paul Ehrlich. His research shows that 50 years is about the lag time before the investment in agricultural R&D fully delivers. In 2063, when climate change and bursting populations will make dire demands of agriculture, he worries we will not have “primed the knowledge pump”. The signs are the pump is already running dry. “For years we saw rice and wheat yields rising,” he says. “Surprise, surprise; now they have almost stopped.”

The post Fields of plenty appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

CAN WE PREDICT the future? According to prognosticators of the 1960s, by now we should all be popping protein pills and commuting in flying cars. But as I sit here in my non-paperless office, typing on a keyboard not much different from a typewriter, eating a lunch that wasn’t made by a food replicator, and preparing to drive myself home in a disappointingly Earthbound car, I wonder what happened to the future portrayed in Star Trek, or 1968’s sci-fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Looking back half a century, have we lived up to the expectations of the likes of John F. Kennedy (who was assassinated in 1963) or Martin Luther King Jr. with his ‘I have a dream’ speech (given on 28 August 1963)? When these iconic influencers looked 50 years into the future, to 2013, could they have accurately foreseen where we would be now?

Predicting things to come is fraught with uncertainty. Nevertheless, for the 50th issue of COSMOS, we decided to try: to commission four of our top writers to look at the best science today, and cast forward to the next 50 years and see what might change our lives, our cities, our economies and the planet on which we live.

How will we feed a world of nine billion – almost three times the number of people alive in 1963? How will we mitigate and adapt to climate change? What innovations are on the horizon that might allow us to live our lives in wealth and comfort, without stripping the planet of resources and damaging it beyond repair? And how will we care for ourselves in a smarter future… where our ageing population is more likely to be treated with an app than an aspirin.

I WASN’T BORN yet in 1963. If I am alive in 2063, I’ll be 87 – one of the estimated two billion people who will be over 60 by the year 2050. In 1950, there were 205 million people over the age of 60: less than 8% of the global population. By 2050, that figure will have risen to 22%.

The world’s population is ageing faster than ever before. It is an enduring phenomenon – according to the United Nations, we will never again return to the young populations our ancestors knew. As contributing editor Robin McKie discovered in our future health special, this ageing effect will have profound consequences, as our stressed health systems balance the needs of larger, frailer populations with the potential benefits of innovations in genetics, personalised healthcare and the increasing global interconnectivity brought by mobile devices.

Suzanne Cory was 21 in 1963. Now an immunologist and molecular biologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne and president of the Australian Academy of Science, ’63 was the year Cory “fell in love with molecular biology”. She has since dedicated her life to understanding the body’s immunological response and to tackling cancer – a series of diseases that is another spectre for the next 50 years of health research, as cancer incidence approaches one in two people in the population.

We should aim to have people remaining healthy right up to the last stages of their life, stresses Cory. “I would like to be as active as I am now and have been all my life until the day I drop dead. I suppose [living to age] 95 is a realistic dream right now; I think that’s certainly within the realms of possibility.”

While we don’t fly our cars, and humans haven’t travelled further than the Moon, there have been transformational leaps in technology in the past 50 years: Cory mentions sequencing technologies, and the ability to ‘knock out’ genes from mice to better understand which genes do what in the body.

“I think it’s very difficult to predict 50 years hence. If I’d asked even the most experienced and brightest scientists around me at that time, in 1963, I don’t think they would ever have predicted we would now be where we are –in terms of understanding or what we were tackling. So I think we can only see a little way forward, and through a glass dimly.”

We can predict some likely research advances, argues Gus Nossal, professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne, and a consultant for both the World Health Organisation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He cites new anti-cancer chemotherapy involving highly multidisciplinary teams from cell biologists to genomic specialists, proteomic experts, X-ray crystallographers and medicinal chemists, for instance. “This multidisciplinary research will produce results. What needs to be understood is that it will take 12–15 years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

“At the same time, it is the very essence of scientific discovery that there will be unpredictable, paradigm-shifting breakthroughs resulting in advances that we haven’t yet dreamt of,” he adds.

The 1960s saw the dawn of a revolution in immunology and preventative medicine, where we first learned to take care of our health, not just battle our diseases, says Nossal. He was 32 in 1963, and was already working at WEHI, which he directed from 1965 to 1996. In the next 50 years, he says, we can expect to see this same kind of revolution in regenerative medicine, and particularly in stem cell science. The latter is “equally replete with hype and hope”, he adds.

IN 1968, WALT PATTERSON, now a physicist and author, laboriously typed out his first novel and sent six carbon copies to friends. This debut effort led to further attempts and, finally, in 1976, to his first non-fiction book Nuclear Power, which sold some 130,000 copies and is still downloaded from his website around 2,000 times a month. Patterson, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London, and a visiting fellow at the University of Sussex in Britain, spent the next four decades writing about energy.

“The whole energy scene is changing faster now than I think it’s ever changed, and I don’t think people realise how fast or how far it’s going to change,” Patterson tells me over the phone from his home in the village of Chesham Bois in Buckinghamshire, Britain. “I think the traditional mindset about what people mean by energy and its role in society is just utterly misguided. And provided we manage to get this right and don’t simply trash the planet – and I think the odds are that we are indeed going to trash the planet – but if we manage somehow, at the last minute, to start thinking about it the right way, then the possibility of doing this dramatically differently is just dangling there in front of us.”

The energy mix of today may not have changed much since 1950, as writer and long-time contributor Richard A. Lovett discovers. But as Patterson points out, that’s going to have to change. He envisages a world where each building, perhaps powered by its own fuel cell and a coating of solar panels, becomes effectively its own power station, able if necessary to be completely off-grid. How soon we get to this kind of innovative energy system is a question of how willing our leaders are to confront the traditionalists, the “fossil mongers”, Patterson says.

“The ground rules are wrong. We have to change the ground rules, including the financial ground rules, so that we can take advantage of the different way that you have to buy and pay for infrastructure electricity. You buy it as an investment, not a commodity; it becomes part of the function of the building.”

If Patterson is right, and the “fossil mongers” are wrong, the subsequent decrease in emissions from a slew of innovations may take us partway to mitigating our “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, as writer Stephen Pincock notes in his feature on the future of climate change. Yet, realistically, much of this change is already “baked into the system”. In terms of limiting temperature rise to below the forecast 2°C, we have, as Australian climate change researcher Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science in Sydney, points out, “a snowball’s chance in hell”.

“We live on a finite planet that doesn’t have an infinite capacity to support continuous growth in consumption,” says Michael Raupach, from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra. Raupach is one of the authors of a book released in February 2013 by the Australian Academy of Science; Negotiating our Future: Living Scenarios for Australia to 2050. It’s an attempt to “catalyse a scientifically informed national conversation”, says co-author John Finnigan, chief research scientist of CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. “As far as knowledge allows, we must work through the consequences of inevitable trends and possible choices and, where the results of these are uncertain, we must try to put honest limits on what we know.”

WHAT STRUCK ME as our four features rolled in – including Elizabeth Finkel’s analysis of the dream of sustainable agriculture – was just how positive scientists were about the likelihood science would come to the rescue in the face of a future rife with challenge. As Robert Zeigler, director of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, Philippines, imagines in Finkel’s narrative, it is entirely possible to create a world where we can have our cake and eat it too. Finkel quotes Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota: “Feeding nine billion people in a truly sustainable way will be one of the greatest challenges our civilisation has ever faced. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world.” It seems that many experts believe we can, and should, meet such audacious goals.

When I ask Cory if she thinks this positivity is justified, she replies with characteristic candour: “Well, you know, it depends which day you ask me.” So is this a good day or a tough one, I ask?

“I think basically I’m very positive, but I do have concerns. One thing I’d like to say is that humanity shouldn’t look to science to solve problems, because we won’t be able to solve all problems. I hope that humanity uses science to become wiser… to enhance the quality of life, not just to allow us to cope with an increasingly unpleasant world.

“We have an incredibly beautiful and amazing planet. I marvel at it every day: I marvel at evolution, I marvel at the complexity and the diversity in this world. It’s very precious. We must use science to protect it and save it from us; and that requires us becoming much wiser through our knowledge of science and communicating that wisdom and persuading society to take certain decisions.”

With or without flying cars, robot handmaids and food replicators, I think Cory neatly captures the key to understanding and benefiting from science: its ability to both arm us and steel us for change. And that’s a future we can all strive for.

Heather Catchpole is COSMOS’s managing editor.

The post Visions of hope appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Of course plants don’t ‘see’ in pictures as you or I do. They can’t discern between a middle-aged man and a little girl. But they do see light in many ways and colours that we can only imagine. Plants can tell when there’s very little light, or when it’s the middle of the day, or when the Sun is about to set. Plants know if the light is coming from the left, the right or from above. They know if another plant has grown over them, blocking their light. And they know how long the lights have been on.

So, can this be considered ‘plant vision’? To contemplate this strange idea, we must first examine what vision is for us. Imagine a person born blind, accustomed to living in total darkness, being given the ability to discriminate between light and shadow. She’d be able to differentiate between night and day, inside and outside. This new sense would definitely be considered rudimentary sight. Now imagine her being able to discern colour, seeing blue above and green below. I think we can all agree that this fundamental change – from total blindness to seeing colour – would definitely be ‘vision’ for this person.

The word ‘light’ is simply a synonym for electromagnetic waves in the visible part of the spectrum. Blue light has the shortest wavelengths, while red light has the longest, with green, yellow and orange in the middle. We ‘see’ these electromagnetic waves because our eyes have special proteins called photoreceptors that can receive this energy and absorb it.

The retina, the layer at the back of our eyeballs, is covered with rows and rows of these receptors. Each point on the retina has photoreceptors called rods, which are sensitive to all light, and others called cones, which respond to different colours of light.

Rods are more sensitive and enable us to see at night and under low-light conditions – but not in colour. Cones allow us to see different colours in bright light and come in three flavours in humans – red, green and blue. The major difference is the specific chemical they contain. These chemicals, called rhodopsin in rods and photopsins in cones, can absorb light of different wavelengths. Blue light is absorbed by rhodopsin and the blue photopsin; red light by rhodopsin and the red photopsin. Purple light is absorbed by rhodopsin, blue photopsin and red photopsin, but not green photopsin, and so on. Once the rod or cone absorbs the light, it sends a signal to the brain, which processes all the signals from the millions of photoreceptors into a single coherent picture.

But what happens in plants?

IT’S NOT WIDELY known that for 20 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin conducted a series of experiments that still influence research on plants to this day.

Darwin was fascinated by the effects of light on plant growth, as was his son Francis. In his final book, The Power of Movement in Plants, Darwin wrote: “There are extremely few [plants], of which some part… does not bend towards a lateral light.” This behaviour is called phototropism. In 1864, a contemporary of Darwin’s, German botanist Julius von Sachs, discovered that blue light is the primary colour that induces phototropism in plants. Plants are usually ‘blind’ to other colours that have little effect on their bending towards light. But no one knew how or which part of a plant ‘sees’ the light coming from a particular direction.

In a very simple experiment, the Darwins showed that this bending was due not to photosynthesis, the process whereby plants turn light into energy, but rather to some inherent sensitivity. This led them to question which part of the plant saw the light, so they carried out what has become a classic experiment in botany and determined that the ‘eyes’ of the plants were in their tips (see ‘The Darwins’ discovery’).

Several decades later, a new tobacco strain cropped up in southern Maryland in the U.S. and reignited interest in the ways that plants see the world. Farmers would plant their crop in the spring and harvest it in late summer. Some of the plants weren’t harvested, but were left to make flowers to provide the seed for the next year’s crop. In 1906, farmers began to notice a new strain that never seemed to stop growing. It could reach 5 m in height, produce almost 100 leaves, and would stop growing only when the frosts set in. On the surface, such an ever-growing plant would seem a boon. But this new strain, aptly named Maryland Mammoth, was like the two-faced Roman god Janus. On the one hand, it never stopped growing; on the other, it rarely flowered, meaning farmers couldn’t harvest the seed.

In 1918, Wightman W. Garner and Harry A. Allard, two scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), set out to determine why. They planted Maryland Mammoth in pots and left one group outside in the fields. They put the other group in the field during the day and moved it to a dark shed every afternoon. Simply limiting the amount of light was enough to cause Maryland Mammoth to stop growing and start flowering. In other words, if it was exposed to the long days of summer, it would keep growing leaves. But if it experienced artificially shorter days, it would flower.

This phenomenon, which is called photoperiodism, provided the first strong evidence that plants measure how much light they take in. Other experiments have revealed that many plants flower only if the day is short; these ‘short-day’ plants include chrysanthemums and soybeans. Others, such as irises and barley, need a long day to flower. This discovery meant that farmers could now manipulate flowering to fit their schedules by controlling the light that a plant sees.

THE CONCEPT SPARKED a rush of follow-up questions: Do plants measure the length of the day or the night? And what colour of light are plants seeing?

Around the time of World War II, scientists discovered that they could manipulate when plants flowered simply by quickly turning lights on and off in the middle of the night. They could take a short-day plant such as the soybean and prevent it from making flowers on short days if they turned on the lights for only a few minutes in the middle of the night. On the other hand, a long-day plant such as the iris could be made to flower even in the middle of the winter, if in the middle of the night the lights were turned on for just a few moments. These experiments proved that what a plant measures is not the length of the day but the length of the continuous period of darkness.

The scientists were also curious about the colour of light that the plants saw. What they discovered was surprising: the plants – and it didn’t matter which ones were tested – only responded to a flash of red during the night. Blue or green flashes wouldn’t influence when the plant flowered, but only a few seconds of red would. Plants were differentiating between colours: they were using blue light to know which direction to bend in and red light to measure the length of the night.

Then, in the early 1950s, Harry Borthwick and his colleagues in the USDA lab where Maryland Mammoth was first studied made the amazing discovery that far-red light – which has wavelengths that are a bit longer than bright red and is most often seen, just barely, at dusk – could cancel the effect of the red light on plants.

If you take irises, for example, which normally don’t flower on long nights, and give them a shot of red light in the middle of the night, they’ll make bright and beautiful flowers. But if you shine far-red light on them – a light in between red and infrared on the spectrum – right after the pulse of red, it’s as if they never saw the red light to begin with. They won’t flower. If you then shine red light on them after the far-red, they will. Hit them again with far-red light, and they won’t. And so on. A few seconds is enough. The red light turns on flowering; the far-red light turns it off. On a philosophical level, we can say that a plant remembers the last colour it saw.

Ecologically, this makes a lot of sense. In nature, the last light that any plant sees at the end of the day is far-red, and this signifies to the plant that it should ‘turn off’. In the morning, it sees red light and it wakes up. In this way, a plant measures how long ago it last saw red light and adjusts its growth accordingly.

But exactly which part of the plant sees the red and far-red light to regulate flowering? Surprisingly, it’s not in its tip. If in the middle of the night you shine a beam of light on different parts of the plant, you discover that it’s sufficient to illuminate any single leaf to regulate flowering in the entire plant. On the other hand, if all the leaves are pruned, the plant is blind to any flashes of light.

PLANTS HAVE multiple photoreceptors: they see directional blue light, which means they must have at least one blue-light photoreceptor, known as phototropin. As discussed, they also see red and far-red light for flowering, which points to at least one photoreceptor that can detect these wavelengths, called phytochrome. But to determine just how many photoreceptors plants possess, scientists had to wait several decades for the era of molecular genetics.

The research was spearheaded in the early 1980s by Maarten Koornneef at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and refined in numerous labs. Koornneef asked a simple question: What would a ‘blind’ plant look like? Plants grown in darkness or dim light are taller than those grown in bright light. This makes sense because plants normally elongate in darkness, when they’re trying to get out of the soil into the light or when they’re in the shade and need to make their way towards light.

Koornneef used Arabidopsis thaliana, a small plant similar to wild mustard. He treated a batch of arabidopsis seeds with chemicals known to induce mutations in DNA, then grew the seedlings under various colours of light and looked for tall mutants. He found many of them. Some grew taller under blue light, but were of normal height when grown under red light. Some were taller under red light but normal under blue. Some were taller under ultraviolet (UV) light but normal under all other kinds, and some were taller under red and blue lights. A few were taller only under dim light, while others were taller only under bright-light conditions.

Many of these mutants that were blind to specific colours of light were defective in the particular photoreceptors that absorb the light. A plant that had no phytochrome grew in red light as if it were growing in the dark. We now know that arabidopsis has at least 11 different photoreceptors: some tell a plant when to germinate, some tell it when to bend to the light, some tell it when to flower, and some let it know when it’s night-time.

So, plant vision is much more complex than human sight at the level of perception. Indeed, light for a plant is much more than a signal; light is food. Plants use light to turn water and carbon dioxide into sugars that in turn provide food for animals. But plants are static, unable to migrate in search of food. To compensate, they must have the ability to find their food – to seek out and capture light. That means they need to know where the light is, and rather than moving towards the food, as an animal would, a plant grows towards its food.

Many plants start growing in the spring. How do they know when the spring has started? Their phytochrome tells them that the days are getting progressively longer. Plants also flower and set seed in the autumn. How do they know it’s autumn? Their phytochrome tells them that the nights are getting longer.

Sight is the ability not only to detect electromagnetic waves, but also to respond to these waves. Plants don’t have a nervous system that translates light signals into pictures. Instead, they translate light signals into different cues for growth. Plants don’t have eyes, just as we don’t have leaves. But we can both detect the light that, ultimately, we all depend on.

Daniel Chamovitz is director of the Manna Centre for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University. This is an edited extract from his book, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses, published by Scribe in 2012.

The post Seeking the light appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Modern balloon-borne astronomy began in 1912, when Austrian-born scientist Victor Hess demonstrated that cosmic rays were of extraterrestrial origin. Since that time, well over 10,000 stratospheric balloon research flights have been carried out around the world, nearly 800 of them in the clear skies of Australia.

It’s not just the field of astronomy that benefits: such forays into the atmosphere are tools in understanding atmospheric physics, conducting experiments in micro-gravity, and monitoring the effects of human-made atmospheric pollutants, which is an area of increasing importance.

BALLOON ASTRONOMY has led to some fabulous discoveries in the fields of gamma-ray and X-ray astronomy. In 1970, the University of Melbourne launched a balloon into the atmosphere and with it made a thorough and unique 5-year study of the gamma-ray emission from a very fast-spinning, young neutron star (a star formed from the remains of a supernova, a massive star’s final death throes) called the Vela pulsar. The emission was found to be high in gamma rays – contrary to the standard theoretical model for such objects, which predicts that these very dense stars would emit radiation that has lower energy levels.

Also in 1970, a research group from Rice University in Houston, Texas, used balloon astronomy to detect gamma-ray emissions of a particular energy coming from the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, which could only be attributed to the annihilation of matter and antimatter in the form of electrons and positrons. This discovery sparked a period of extensive study by several U.S. and European groups over the next 20 years.

In 1983, the University of Melbourne, in collaboration with the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, launched a balloon from Alice Springs that stayed afloat for 22 days while circling the globe. This experiment, called EOSCOR (Extended Observation of Solar Cosmic Radiation), conducted high-sensitivity measurements of neutrons emitted from the Sun. The EOSCOR flight is the longest balloon flight from Australia to date.

Four years later, in February 1987, astronomers spotted the explosion of a blue super-giant star in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. This supernova, which became known as SN1987A, was the first in more than 300 years to be bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. Visible only from the Southern Hemisphere, it led to the most intense period in the history of balloon-borne astronomy anywhere in the world. Twenty-five flights were carried out over the next two years from Alice Springs, involving research groups from Australia, Italy, France, Germany, Britain and the USA. The observations gave astrophysicists the opportunity to test theoretical models of supernova explosions, in particular those relating to the acceleration of particles to ultra-high energies, and the production and decay of short-lived isotopes, elements with varying numbers of neutrons.

Gamma-ray observations made by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Canberra remain the only such observations from a nearby supernova so soon after the explosion. I was the leader of this project, and within 24 hours of the report of the SN1987A sighting, I had set up a multinational collaboration involving astrophysicists from Britain, Germany, Italy and the USA. We were able to carry out a highly successful flight on day 55 after the explosion, using a discarded 20-year-old balloon with a volume of 600,000 m3.

THE EARLIEST stratospheric balloon research in Australia took place in 1952 with an experiment flying nuclear emulsions, a form of photographic plate sensitive to high-energy particles, to an altitude of 38 km to study cosmic rays. The University of Melbourne team included one of the first female researchers in the field, physicist Jean Laby. In conjunction with Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, the university was also active in the study of atmospheric aerosols, both natural and artificial, until the early 1980s. The payloads tended to be small, weighing less than 10 kg, and were carried aloft by rubber balloons that were similar to weather balloons – a far cry from the massive payloads flown on gigantic balloons in the present era.

The Cold War, and the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere by the superpowers in the 1950s and 1960s, led to the development of modern-day stratospheric balloon research in Australia. The Australian government, using funding from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, set up a launch facility in Mildura, Victoria, to regularly monitor the airborne radioactive fallout from these tests. More than 600 flights were conducted over 15 years, starting in 1961 and mainly from Mildura, with some from Longreach in Queensland.

A typical flight saw a 50,000 m3 balloon carry a payload of up to 200 kg to an altitude of 20–40 km. Each flight lasted three to six hours, with instruments recording atmospheric contamination from the nuclear explosions. (Some flights also carried piggyback experiments for the CSIRO, mainly in the form of nuclear emulsions.) The international scientific community soon realised that Australia was the ideal place to conduct balloon-borne X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy. One reason was that the centre of the Milky Way – which passes directly overhead at 27 degrees south latitude, and which cannot easily be seen from the Northern Hemisphere – harbours many astronomical bodies that are copious emitters of radiation at these wavelengths.

The 30 years from 1965 saw intense activity in balloon astronomy. The universities of Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania, and leading universities and space agencies from Europe, Japan and the U.S. were involved individually and in international collaborations in nearly 200 flights. The vast tracts of thinly populated areas in Australia provided the ideal location for operations. The launch sites, in addition to the home base at Mildura, included Parkes and Broken Hill (New South Wales), Oakey, Charleville and Longreach (Queensland) and Alice Springs (Northern Territory).

The Australian Balloon Launch Station in Alice Springs, near the town’s airport, was established in 1974 to take advantage of its central position on the continent. Most stratospheric balloon launch activity in Australia now takes place from this site.

WE LAUNCH THESE giant balloons because the Earth’s atmospheric pressure decreases exponentially with altitude, with 99% of the atmosphere contained within the first 32 km above sea level. Light and radio waves from stars and galaxies are able to penetrate the atmosphere, so traditional ground-based observatories can be used to study these wavelengths. X-rays and gamma rays, on the other hand, are almost completely absorbed by the thin air of the upper atmosphere above roughly 25 km altitude.

Yet, observations at these wavelengths are absolutely crucial for understanding the nature of a range of objects, including very dense neutron stars and black holes. For instance, a black hole can gravitationally siphon off gas from a star unlucky enough to be orbiting the black hole. As it does this, this gas compresses and heats up to temperatures of more than 100,000°C. At these extreme temperatures, the gas gives off X-rays, and observing these is a key tool for astronomers to study otherwise invisible black holes.

Gamma rays are produced in the extremely high-energy processes that are known to occur in supernova explosions, as well as in the dense cores of galaxies and in rapidly rotating neutron stars. So by detecting gamma rays, we can learn more about these enigmatic phenomena, too.

Because Earth’s atmosphere blocks X-rays and gamma rays, using satellites above the atmosphere would seem the obvious way of observing at these energies. But carrying instruments to the edge of space on stratospheric balloons is a practical alternative. The project lead-time for balloon experiments is only two to four years, as opposed to typically 10 years for a satellite project, allowing more up-to-date instrumentation to be used. Another benefit is the cost – only about 1% of the cost of launching a similar experiment into space.

Other areas of astronomical research that lend themselves to study using stratospheric balloons include investigations at infrared wavelengths, cosmic rays and the cosmic microwave background radiation (the afterglow of the Big Bang).

A MODERN PAYLOAD of two tonnes requires a balloon with a volume of more than a million cubic metres to reach a float altitude of 40 km (see ‘Reach for the sky’). Such a balloon is made of plastic film just 0.02 mm thick, and is more than 200 m long when laid out on the ground. To ensure it doesn’t become damaged during the launch process, the balloon is laid out on canvas mats to protect it from the grass and scrub of the launch area. In spite of the thin film used, the balloon itself still weighs two tonnes, and only trained personnel are permitted to handle it.

Presently, launches are carried out using the so-called ‘dynamic launch’ method. The payload is suspended from the boom of a heavy crane, and is connected to an open parachute, which is secured to the bottom of the balloon with steel cabling. Combined, the payload, parachute, balloon and cabling are known as the flight train.

A launch requires calm weather conditions up to 500 m altitude, as the flight train is around 250 m tall at the moment of launch. (A variety of methods have been used to cope with winds, including the expensive idea of launching from the deck of an aircraft carrier moving downwind at the same speed as the prevailing wind, to nullify the wind’s effect.) Low-level winds are continually monitored to ensure they are within the acceptable limits. The best conditions are usually just before dawn.

I’ve been involved with more than 100 launches, and it’s a stressful time. A typical balloon costs up to $300,000, with the helium an additional $100,000, depending on the mass being lifted. A point-of-no-return is reached when the inflation has begun, as the balloon can’t be reused; both it and the helium must be sacrificed in case of balloon damage or equipment malfunction. So, as you can imagine, with all this at stake a successful launch is a huge relief to the team.

The top 15% of the balloon, called the bubble, is inflated with helium gas, the amount carefully measured so that, in addition to lifting the mass of the payload and the balloon, there is an additional free-lift of about 10%. Unlike a hot air balloon, it is simply not practical to inflate the whole balloon because of its enormous size. When enough helium has been transferred, the bubble is released from its restraint, and the balloon rises to a position above the crane, which moves to line up with the wind direction. When the flight train is forward of the crane, it is released. The whole process, from moving out onto the launch area to lift-off, takes more than five hours.

Celebrations for a successful launch are invariably muted, as the balloon must still ascend through a harsh environment to its float altitude. Air temperature decreases through the lowest 10–16 km of the atmosphere, called the troposphere. Above this, up to about 50 km lies the stratosphere, where the temperature begins to slowly rise again. The boundary between the two layers is called the tropopause, and the temperature here can be –80°C or lower. The ascent rate, typically about 250 to 300 m per minute, can slow down in this cold region because of the resulting decrease in the balloon’s volume and hence buoyancy. So we drop ballast from the balloon at this point to speed up its ascent rate through this region. The overall ascent time to float altitude is between two and three hours.

At a typical float altitude of 30 km, the temperature is around –30°C and residual air pressure is less than 0.5 kilopascals (typical pressure at sea level is about 100 kPa)… almost as good as being in space. Naturally, all hardware has to be designed and rigorously tested in laboratory thermal and vacuum chambers to ensure it will work reliably in these extreme conditions.

The flight train is now at the mercy of the prevailing winds. Stratospheric winds in the Southern Hemisphere are strong westerlies between April and October, blowing at up to 200 km per hour, and strong easterlies during the other six months. Between those two seasons the winds change direction, and a period of ‘turnaround’ exists when the winds are light, frequently with a north–south component. This period is especially sought after by astronomers, as the balloon can remain within tracking range of the ground station for extended periods of time. Durations of more than 85 hours have been achieved from Alice Springs, with the flights terminating less than 300 km from the launch site.

Once the balloon has reached float altitude, and all systems are confirmed to be working, the scientific observations can start. In the case of an astronomical payload, this will involve pointing the detectors or receivers at the targets of interest, and collection of the data.

AT THE END OF a flight’s operational period, the team will terminate the flight by radio command from the ground station or a tracking aircraft. The payload, with parachute attached, is detached by severing the cables that couple them to the bottom of the balloon. The parachute has a cord attached to a panel near the top of the balloon – as the parachute and payload begin to fall, the cord rips a hole in the balloon, which then descends separately to the ground.

Payload descent takes about 45 minutes. Before the parachute opens, the payload is in virtual freefall. When the parachute opens, there is a tremendous jolt, so all the mechanical structures have to be designed to withstand a decelerating force 10 times the force of acceleration due to Earth’s gravity. Immediately upon ground impact, the parachute separates so that the payload doesn’t get dragged along by winds. Although payloads are protected by padding, severe damage can result if the landing occurs on rocky, uneven ground.

The balloon’s descent is very different. Even though it has a rip in it, the balloon initially sinks very slowly simply because of the enormous volume of helium inside. But the descent gathers pace as the helium spills out, and the balloon overtakes the parachuting payload on the journey back to the ground. The points of impact cannot be forecast with any precision: the balloon and payload usually land within 10 km of each other, but some payloads have had to be rescued from thickly wooded areas, and even from the middle of salt lakes that abound in central Australia. Helicopters have had to be used to retrieve payloads from areas that have proved inaccessible even to all-terrain vehicles.

Due to the complexity and cost of modern instruments, balloon astronomy campaigns are restricted to every two to three years on average. A campaign will typically last two months, involve up to 60 personnel, and result in two or three flights.

ONE DISADVANTAGE OF balloon-borne versus satellite-borne astronomy is that the observation time is typically limited to one to three days, before the balloon begins to descend due to loss of helium or reaches the edge of its telemetry range.

The U.S. and Japanese space agencies (NASA and JAXA) are independently developing super-pressure balloons to overcome this. These balloons are made of heavier material and are sealed, unlike balloons that are presently used, which are open at the bottom. These super-pressure balloons will significantly reduce the loss of helium, and in principle they should be able to stay afloat for up to six months, providing a platform that would be very competitive with satellites.

A balloon of this kind would be launched not during the wind turnaround periods, but rather during the season of strong east–west winds. This would enable it to circle the Earth near the latitude of Alice Springs over 10 to 14 days, with radio communication accomplished via satellites. Periodic dropping of ballast would compensate for any small losses of helium. Such balloons are scheduled for testing in the near future at the Alice Springs Balloon Launching Station, which is operated by our group at UNSW Canberra. Such long-duration flights from the Southern Hemisphere are attractive because they would overfly fewer countries, reducing the number of approvals needed.

Current balloon-borne X-ray and gamma-ray detectors are large, complicated instruments requiring significant resource and time commitments. However, there are other fields where research with small and medium size payloads can be highly effective. For instance, UNSW is developing a payload to investigate how smoke spreads and fire propagates in micro-gravity conditions, such as that found in spacecraft in orbit. This could have eventual safety applications in a crewed space station. Micro-gravity can be simulated when a payload is allowed to freefall from a balloon.

JAXA is currently negotiating with the Australian government for approval for balloon operations in Australia over the next decade, targeted at astronomy and atmospheric physics, and NASA flights from Australia are set to continue. The potential of this balloon-borne research, it seems, is sky-high.

Ravi Sood has flown balloon-borne experiments from four different continents, and is Australia’s leading stratospheric scientific ballooning researcher.

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One of those women, Angela Dulhunty, became a university biochemist and the partner of Peter Gage, an electrophysiologist at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. Gage, who died in 2005, was fascinated by ion channels, the tunnels through proteins that marshal the flow of charged atoms into and out of cells. Common in muscle and nerve cells, ion channels had just been found in some viruses, and Gage’s team was investigating these.

In 1996, the team was excited to discover that a protein produced by HIV (the virus that can cause AIDS) formed sodium channels. Viruses hijack the cells they invade, turning them into replication factories – the enslaved cells spend the rest of their lives manufacturing, packaging and exporting viruses. Clearly, if HIV was creating a sodium channel protein, sodium channels must in some way be important for its survival, the scientists reasoned.

Soon afterwards, they found that some of the chemical compounds they kept in their laboratory fridge completely incapacitated the channel. At the time, exactly how a sodium channel might be helping the virus was not known. It’s still not certain, but it is now clear that the protein, known as VPU, straddles the membranes of the HIV-infected cells. This VPU channel enables control of sodium ions passing through those membranes – probably to create an environment that’s ideal for virus replication. Clearly, Gage and his team were onto something that might have potential in fighting HIV.

THE OTHER HORSE-RIDING devotee was Gail Snedaker, who married businessman Peter Scott and along with him started several companies producing and directing film, multimedia and conference events. The four used to meet frequently.

“The two Peters would sit down with their drinks and Peter Scott would ask ‘now what’s happening in the lab?’,” says Dulhunty. When Scott heard about Gage’s work on HIV, he immediately thought it must have commercial potential, she says.

“Peter had this new approach to attacking viruses,” says Scott. “I told him, ‘This is incredible stuff. You must be able to get money to develop it.’ He was spending so much time trying to get grants – and was getting peanuts.”

And so, in 1997, Scott embarked on a journey that was to occupy him full-time, unpaid, for the next four years. Little did he know they were entering a phase described by Simon McKeon, who chaired a strategic review of health and medical research in Australia, released in December 2012, as “the valleys of death”. These twin valleys are the ‘preclinical’ and ‘early clinical’ testing phases (see ‘The trials of taking a drug to market’), which cost drug developers millions of dollars as they take a compound with potential in the lab to the point where a multinational pharmaceutical company will buy or license it.

“It takes a small village to get a drug to the clinic and eventually become successful,” says Raymond Schinazi, a hugely successful entrepreneur and pharmacist based at Emory University in Atlanta in the USA. He negotiated the valleys of death many times, and has created, run and sold three biotechnology companies to so-called ‘big pharma’ at handsome profits. Worldwide, 90% of people with HIV use a drug that was developed by his group.

“You have to have an entrepreneurial flair, a good business plan and follow the vision,” says Schinazi. “In my case, I was born in the Middle East, so I know how to drive a hard bargain. You learn how to negotiate, make deals and, when you are ready, to compromise.”

SCOTT HAD A HARD road ahead. In the late 1990s, he used his entrepreneurial flair to persuade three other ANU professors whose research had commercial potential (including Angela Dulhunty), as well as the ANU itself, to form a private company along with Gage. “I asked Peter how much money we would need to progress all the research,” says Scott. “He said between two and three million – which was a huge sum of money to him. In terms of the funding they normally get for research, it was enormous.”

But science researchers rarely think commercially, Scott knew. Pricing it himself, he came up with a ballpark goal of $12 million. “Then I had the intellectual property of the company valued. We had just one patent at that stage – for a method of testing ion channel activity – but that and the researchers’ know-how came back valued at about $31 million.”

Once formed, the company needed to attract investors. But private companies aren’t allowed to advertise for shareholders from the general public, so Scott was after the ‘sophisticated investors’ – those who could put up a cool half a million. The husband-and-wife team and the PR arm at ANU went to the press to try to develop some interest in the fledgling product.

“That night in early 2000, we were on the television news of every major channel and had a seven-minute segment on the ABC’s 7.30 Report. We were pretty close to the front page of virtually every newspaper in Australia,” says Scott. A total of about $3.5 million was offered – but none was from the required ‘sophisticated investors’. So, Scott then knocked on the doors of venture capitalists around Australia. “I quickly learned why they are called ‘vulture capitalists’,” he says. “They are either not interested because it is not big enough or far enough along, or they want so much of it for peanuts. We decided the only way forward was to float the bloody thing on the ASX [Australian stock exchange].”

SCHINAZI HAS ALSO overcome plenty of hurdles in taking drugs through the valleys of death. Universities are great environments for making discoveries, he says, because curiosity and innovation are the drivers, rather than monetary reward. But at some stage you have to translate what you’ve done into something useful. “What’s the point of these wonderful studies if you are going to leave the drug you discovered sitting on the shelf where it’s not going to help anybody?” he asks.

So how do you get the research out there in public view? “This was the frustration,” Schinazi admits. In 1990, during the burgeoning AIDS epidemic, Schinazi was championing his research into drugs to combat HIV. “I don’t think Emory University understood – at first they wouldn’t even file the patents. In those days entrepreneurship was a dirty word.”

Schinazi says he and chemistry colleague Dennis Liotta had to push very hard to get their first HIV patent filed for blockbuster drugs lamivudine and emtricitabine (which now earn big pharma more than US$1 billion per year). “Even if you have the best drug in the world, people don’t believe you. You have to be a champion for your molecule. You have to do everything you can – even pulling out your credit card to pay all the bills.”

Things have changed a lot at Emory University since those days, says Schinazi. “I think they’ve woken up and realised that this is a fantastic new source of revenue. Not only that, but it also provides prestige – you can say ‘this drug was invented here’. Emory’s technology transfer office is very professional now.”

Drugs are an industry with big money attached. Michelle Miller, who sports a PhD in retroviruses, research experience in big pharma and time as a biotechnology venture capital fund manager, is now the managing director of Biotron Ltd, the company born of Scott and Gage’s labours.

Some of the recent big pharma deals have been “just extraordinary”, she says. In November 2011, Gilead, a U.S.-based big pharma company, bought biotech company Pharmasset for US$11.4 billion – “a phenomenal amount of money,” says Miller. In January 2012, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) paid US$2.5 billion to acquire drug development company Inhibitex, primarily for a promising drug that targets hepatitis C.

Yet even when big pharma has taken on a drug, there are still risks. In August 2012, BMS’s new drug became a casualty of the second valley. Phase II clinical trials were stopped on safety grounds, with nine people hospitalised, one of whom died of heart failure. “That shows you it’s a very risky business. That drug would presumably have been fine all along until that stage. Every drug’s fine until the day it’s not,” says Miller.

Pharmasset was one of Schinazi’s companies. It was bought for its hepatitis C drug, now called GS-7977, which is widely touted as the front runner in the race for effective ‘direct-acting antivirals’ targeted at hepatitis C, and is undergoing the final stage of clinical trials (phase III). Schinazi says getting a big pharma to buy your drug is like fishing. “You have to have a good bait first of all, and then a good line helps, and being able to reel in slowly but surely, keeping your line straight is important – and you can bring in a fish.” One gets the feeling he enjoys this and is a master of his game.

Schinazi is a nucleoside chemist by training – an expert at making what he calls ‘fraudulent’ nucleosides, similar to the natural nucleotide bases of DNA and RNA. These interloper bases will stop DNA or RNA replication dead in their tracks and this strategy has been at the heart of his successful antiretroviral drugs for HIV.

“Bill Prusoff at Yale University was my mentor. He should have won a Nobel Prize because he really came up with the idea of selective antiviral agents – meaning a drug that doesn’t affect the host cells but stops the virus replicating. Things like strong acid will kill the virus for sure, but it will also kill the cell. Bill taught me the antiviral business.

“I learned that the key was to be able to add value to the technology to the point where you can bring in, as I say, the big fish.” Finding the right time to reel in that ‘fish’ is vital. “What you want to do is to add the value at the time when the research costs become very expensive but you have reduced the risk. You don’t want to sell too early… and you don’t want to sell too late – because you’ll be broke, and it’s never a good thing to negotiate from a weak position!”

Although he has created and sold biotech companies, Schinazi thinks it’s better to license technology than form a company so scientists can “get on and invent something else”. He adds: “We’re not trained as businessmen, we’re not trained to raise money, we’re not trained to manage people in industry but we had to learn all this. It’s a lot of hard work!”

WHILE SCHINAZI REAPS the rewards of his labours, Biotron has been making progress through the valleys, hoping the journey will pay off.

Miller came on board, “intrigued” by Gage’s novel approach, but her big pharma experience soon told her they needed to develop a new drug, to maximise the commercial potential. Gage’s compounds were known compounds that Biotron had ‘use patents’ for – types of patents that give a company the right to use someone else’s compound in a particular way – and they weren’t human-approved drugs. What Biotron needed was a ‘composition of matter’ patent on a drug that stopped the VPU protein’s ion channels from working in HIV. They needed to own a molecule.

“If you design a drug, you make it, and nobody else has made it before and described it, and you can show what it does – you own it for 20 years,” says Miller. So Miller initiated a program to develop about 250 potential new drugs that were related to, but not the same as, Gage’s compounds and then set about selecting the best one to progress.

Choosing the drug the company will go forward with is a big decision, Miller says. “You only get one chance at it – it’s a bit scary actually – it’s a big roll of the dice.” The compound they eventually picked, called BIT225, is currently undergoing phase II clinical trials. Although they selected it for its activity against the VPU protein of the HIV virus, it also has activity against a protein called p7, which is important in the hepatitis C virus, and recently much of their attention has been focussed on this market.

“Hepatitis C is a more straightforward disease than HIV,” says Miller. The existing standard treatment drugs – interferon and ribavirin – don’t have much success in patients infected with the most common form of the virus, Miller points out. So there’s been a push for new drugs that could work in combination with the current treatments.

Currently, Biotron is near the end of the ‘second valley’ after successfully undergoing preclinical testing and phase I trials of BIT225. Preclinical testing (the first valley) includes testing the drug in animals for toxicity. “Every single drug on the planet is toxic. If you do these studies and you show there’s no toxicity, the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] will throw your drug out. You have to keep going until there’s toxicity because you need to show that it’s a long way from the doses that you’re going to be using,” says Miller. The type of damage found – perhaps to the kidney or heart – will be a useful warning of what to look out for when the drug finally comes to be tested in humans.

Next come studies in healthy human volunteers, known as phase I clinical studies (the second valley). The volunteers take a single dose of the drug. The first cohort of volunteers takes an extremely low dose, and each successive cohort takes a slightly higher amount. “You go up to the level you feel comfortable with – making sure you are covering the levels your drug would be prescribed at,” says Miller.

All the trials are carried out by a contract research organisation that works to ‘good clinical practice standards’. “It takes a long time and it costs a lot of money,” says Miller. “This area is so regulated – but it is what all drugs have to go through for regulatory approval in major markets.”

In October 2012, Biotron announced the encouraging results of its latest phase II trials in people with hepatitis C, carried out in Bangkok. In a trial of 24 patients, no virus was detected in the blood of any patient who took the highest dose of BIT225 for a month at the start of almost a year of dosage by the standard treatment. In comparison, 25% of patients on the standard treatment alone still had detectable virus when treatment ended. Miller is currently running another Bangkok phase II trial, testing BIT225’s efficacy against HIV, and anticipates the results in early 2013. She’s also just announced the start of phase II trials on people who are ‘co-infected’ – those who have both hepatitis C and HIV.

WHILE THE VAST sums paid by big pharma have lured Biotron into hepatitis C trials for BIT225, Miller is particularly excited about the drug’s potential for HIV. Comparatively little is known about the VPU protein, which is targeted by BIT225. It is thought to be important in the ‘budding off’ of viruses as they leave the subjugated human cell that has been turned into a virus-factory.

“It was challenging for us when we started,” says Miller. “People in HIV research said ‘why are you bothering with VPU?’.” Nowadays, thanks to Schinazi’s and other antiretroviral drugs, most patients with HIV have very well controlled disease. But if patients go off the drugs, the virus rebounds. Miller says BIT225 is active in the monocyte macrophages (a type of white blood cell that migrates into tissue), which seem to be an important reservoir for HIV. The hope is that tackling the virus here may prevent the rebound.

“The C word (for cure) is a word you don’t like using,” says Miller, explaining that the idea of curing HIV has been ridiculed in the past. But she’s now detecting a shift to a new optimism. “Now the buzzword among HIV academics is ‘strategies for elimination’.”

Miller says the Biotron story is typical of drug development. “People think drug development happens in the big pharma companies,” she says. But trials are expensive, and big pharma relies more and more on a feed chain. Drug development is risky. Biotech companies are more cost-effective – particularly in Australia – and we’re more flexible than the big pharma. We’re carrying the risk, but that means that there is a pay-off when we on-sell the drug to pharma companies.”

She’s confident Biotron has enough cash to get through the second valley of death and is focussing on making her bait sufficiently enticing to be bought or licensed at the “right price”. She says it’s challenging because BIT225 works in a different way from other drugs under development. “We’ve been talking to potential partners for a long time. They want to see some really robust data, and we are getting it. It is tricky being at our end – it really is dancing with elephants.”

Schinazi has obviously mastered the dance. He sounds utterly confident that the drug Gilead acquired from his company Pharmasset for a legendary US$11.4 billion will be a winner. Not only that, he believes the drug will effectively cure hepatitis C and claims it “could lead to global eradication” of the disease. Of course, he has reeled in the fish – a very big fish – and the risk (and rewards) lie with big pharma now.

Sadly, Peter Gage did not live to see whether his research on ion channels will result in his company landing a big pharma investment and making a marketable drug. But Miller is fishing hard.

Clare Pain is a Sydney-based science writer and is a regular COSMOS contributor.

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