Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The European Commission is funding a 2-year, $312,000 study on the safety and ethical aspects of synthetic biology. From the introduction part of the site:

We will pursue our objectives by means of a fact-finding mission, contribution to the European “inaugural” Conference on Synthetic Biology in Zurich (SB 3.0), an open e-forum and an international workshop. The foreseen impact of our project will be no less than to stimulate a European debate on these issues at an early stage. Past experiences, especially in the field of GM-crops, have shown the importance of an early bio-safety and ethics debate. The community recognized this need, but up to now discussions are fragmentary. Our project aims to stimulate a European debate in a proactive way. That way we will contribute to the European synthetic biology community, supplementing genuine biosafety and bioethics aspects.

Looks like a great start on addressing a very important area of concern. For a blog post of mine that goes into a bit more detail on the issue of synthetic biology and its risks, see here.

Five evolutionary stages of pathogen progression from animals to human transmission have been identified A proposed monitoring system of viral chatter has been proposed to provide warning of new diseases before they spread to humans.

In 1999, Wolfe began field work in the jungles of Cameroon to track “viral chatter,” or the regular transmission of diseases from animals to people, usually without further spread among humans. By monitoring the habits and the blood pathologies of bushmeat hunters and their kills, Wolfe and his team have identified at least three previously unknown retroviruses from the same family as HIV, as well as promoted safe practices for handling animals and animal carcasses.

“The Cameroon project demonstrated that it’s possible to collect information on viral transmission under very difficult circumstances from these highly exposed people,” Wolfe said.

With Cameroon as a prototype and a $2.5 million National Institutes of Health Pioneer Award as seed money, Wolfe has gone on to create a network of virus-discovery projects that monitor hunters, butchers, and wildlife trade and zoo workers in some of the world’s most remote viral hotspots. The network of a dozen sites in China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Laos, Madagascar and Paraguay include source locations for such emerging diseases as SARS, avian flu, Nipah, Ebola and monkeypox.

There are more details of the five stages and a proposed study of the detailed origins of disease.

Wolfe and his colleagues begin by identifying five intermediate stages through which a pathogen exclusively infecting animals must travel before exclusively infecting humans. The research team identifies no inevitable progression of microbes from Stage 1 to Stage 5 and notes that many microbes remain stuck at a specific stage. The journey is arduous, and pathogens rarely climb through all five stages:

Stage 1. Agent only in animals: A microbe that is present in animals but not detected in humans under natural conditions. Examples include most malarial plasmodia.

Stage 2. Primary infection: Animal pathogens that are transmitted from animals to humans as a primary infection but not transmitted among humans. Examples include anthrax, rabies and West Nile virus.

Stage 3. Limited outbreak: Animal pathogens that undergo only a few cycles of secondary transmission among humans so that occasional human outbreaks triggered by a primary infection soon die out. Examples include the Ebola, Marburg and monkeypox viruses.

Stage 4. Long outbreak: A disease that exists in animals and has a natural cycle of infecting humans by primary transmission from the animal host but that also undergoes long sequences of secondary transmission between humans without involvement of animals. Examples include Chagas disease, yellow fever, dengue fever, influenza A, cholera, typhus and West African sleeping sickness.

Stage 5. Exclusive human agent: A pathogen exclusive to humans that involves either an ancestral pathogen present in a common ancestor of chimps and humans or involves a more recent pathogen that evolved into a specialized human pathogen. Examples include HIV, measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox and syphilis.

In addition, the team examines 25 diseases of important historic consequence to humans. Of the 25 diseases, 17 impose the heaviest world burden today: hepatitis B, influenza A, measles, pertussis, rotavirus A, syphilis, tetanus, tuberculosis, AIDS, Chagas disease, cholera, dengue hemorrhagic fever, East and West African sleeping sicknesses, falciparum and vivax malarias, and visceral leishmaniasis.

Eight more imposed heavy burdens in the past but have been reined in or eradicated thanks to modern medicine and public health practices: temperate diphtheria, mumps, plague, rubella, smallpox, typhoid, typhus and tropical yellow fever. Except for AIDS, dengue fever and cholera, most of the 25 have been important for more than two centuries.

The research team considered the varied pathologies of diseases originating in temperate (15) versus tropical (10) regions, as well as differing pathogen and geographic origins. Among the conclusions:

– Most of the temperate diseases, but none of the tropical diseases, are so-called “crowd epidemic diseases,” occurring locally as a brief epidemic and capable of persisting regionally only in large human populations. Most of the diseases originating in temperate climates convey long-lasting immunity.

– Eight of the 15 temperate diseases probably or possibly reached humans from domestic animals, three more from apes or rodents, and the other four came from still unknown sources. Thus the rise of agriculture, starting 11,000 years ago, plays multiple roles in the evolution of animal pathogens into human pathogens.

– Most tropical diseases have originated in wild, non-human primates. These animals are most closely related to humans and thus pose the weakest species barriers to pathogen transfer.

– Animal-derived human pathogens virtually all arose from pathogens of other warm-blooded vertebrates plus, in two cases, birds.

– Nearly all of the 25 major human pathogens originated in the Old Word (Africa, Europe and Asia), facilitating the conquest of the New World. Chagas disease is the only one of the 25 that clearly originated in the New World, while the debate is unresolved for syphilis and tuberculosis.

–Far more temperate diseases arose in the Old World because far more animals that furnish ancestral pathogens were domesticated there. Far fewer tropical diseases arose in the New World because the genetic distance is greater between humans and primates in this part of the globe.

The conclusions of the review illustrate large gaps in the understanding of the origins of even established major infectious diseases. Almost all studies reviewed were based on specimens collected from domestic animals, plus a few wild animal species.

The researchers propose an “origins initiative” aimed at identifying the origins of a dozen of the most important human infectious diseases as well as a global early warning system to monitor pathogens emerging from animals to humans.

This work is relevant to the lifeboat bioshield

If humanity ever meets lifeforms beyond Earth (or discovers our solitude in our galaxy) one thing will be sure–galactic historians will remark how interesting it must have been living in the nuclear age that “we now enjoy” (assuming we survive of course).

Speaking of nuclear, it seems that some scientists are utilizing a new drug that is showing major promises of fighting against radiation exposure, ensuring that victims not only survive, but remain “semi-healthy” as well.

(Space War) But now researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report they have developed an agent that protects cells from the lethal effects of radiation, regardless of whether it is given before or after exposure.

Using this agent in mice, the investigators found that the treatment helped shield rapidly dividing cells that are most vulnerable to radiation-induced death, providing proof in principle that it is possible to fend off radiation damage, according to a study published in the April issue of Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.

The interesting aspect of this drug is that it can be applied not only before a potential radiation calamity, but afterwards as well. Despite the fact that this drug is intended for those living on our home world, this anti-radiation drug could enable us to actually live upon the lunar and Martian surface.

Although this drug is not a “cure all” for all of our radiation woes, it could represent the first step of us actually living upon other worlds.

In a report to be published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS Computational Biology and currently available online, Sally Blower, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, and Romulus Breban and Raffaele Vardavas, postdoctoral fellows in Blower’s research group, used novel mathematical modeling techniques to predict that current health policy — based on voluntary vaccinations — is not adequate to control severe flu epidemics and pandemics unless vaccination programs offer incentives to individuals.

According to the researchers, the severity of such a health crisis could be reduced if programs were to provide several years of free vaccinations to individuals who pay for only one year. Interestingly, however, some incentive programs could have the opposite effect. Providing free vaccinations for entire families, for example, could actually increase the frequency of severe epidemics. This is because when the head of the household makes a choice — flu shots or no flu shots — on behalf of all the other household members, there is no individual decision-making, and adaptability is decreased.

While other models have determined what proportion of the population would need to be vaccinated in order to prevent a pandemic, none of these models have shown whether this critical coverage can actually be reached. What has been missing, according to Blower, a mathematical and evolutionary biologist, is the human factor.

The human factor involves two biological characteristics, “memory and how adaptable people can be,” Blower said. “These characteristics drive human behavior.”

The model Blower’s team developed is inspired by game theory, used in economics to predict how non-communicating, selfish individuals reach a collective behavior with respect to a common dilemma by adapting to what they think are other people’s decisions. The group modeled each individual’s strategy for making yearly vaccination decisions as an adaptive process of trial and error. They tracked both individual-level decisions and population-level variables — that is, the yearly vaccine coverage level and influenza prevalence, where prevalence is defined as the proportion of the population that is infected. The individual-level model was based on the human biological attributes of memory and adaptability.

The Lifeboat Foundation has the bioshield project

The Oxford Research Group has published “Beyond Terror: The Truth About the Real Threats to Our World”. The report focus on the disproportionate attention given to terrorism compared to the imminent threat from environmental degradation. The report looks at climate change, competition over resources, “marginalisation of the majority world” and global militarisation.

Read the entire report here.

Carnegie Mellon researchers Keith Florig and Baruch Fischhoff offer simple, practical advice: on whether it is worth citizens’ time to stock supplies needed for a home shelter, how urgently should one seek shelter following a nearby nuclear detonation, and how long should survivors remain in a shelter after the radioactive dust settles.


“A number of emergency-management organizations recommend that people stock their homes with a couple dozen categories of emergency supplies,” said Florig of Carnegie Mellon’s engineering and public policy department. “We calculated that it would cost about $240 per year for a typical family to maintain such a stock, including the value of storage space and the time needed to tend to it.”

Their research also suggests that many families who could afford to follow the stocking guidelines might think twice about whether the investment was really worth it, given the low probability that stocked supplies would actually be used in a nuclear emergency.

They advocate simple rules for minimizing risk based on how far people are from the blast. If you are within several miles of the blast, there will be no time to flee and you will have only minutes to seek shelter. If you are 10 miles [downwind] from the blast, you will have 15 to 60 minutes to find shelter, but not enough time to reliably flee the area before the fallout arrives,” said Florig.

However, the prior advice would suggest that if you are 10 miles from the blast that you could move perpendicular to the direction of the fallout plume and get out of the way in under 15 minutes. Needing to move one mile for smaller bombs. So I would think 10–20 miles downwind is a judgement call, but 25 miles you should be able to get out of the way of the fallout plume.

Cities that quickly closed schools and discouraged public gatherings had fewer deaths from the great flu pandemic in 1918 than cities that did not, researchers reported on Monday. Experts agree that a pandemic of some virus, most likely influenza, is almost 100 percent certain. What is not certain is when it will strike and which virus it will be.

In Kansas City, no more than 20 people could attend weddings or funerals. New York mandated staggered shifts at factories. In Seattle, the mayor told people to wear face masks.

No single action worked on its own, the researchers found, it was the combination of measures that saved lives. Peak death rates can be 50% to eight times lower. St. Louis authorities introduced “a broad series of measures designed to promote social distancing” as soon as flu showed up. Philadelphia downplayed the 1918 flu.

Philadelphia ended up with a peak death rate of 257 people per 100,000 population per week. St. Louis had just 31 per 100,000 at the peak.

No good vaccine would be available for months, and drugs that treat influenza are in very short supply.

So experts are looking at what they call non-pharmacologic interventions — ways to prevent infection without drugs. They hope this can buy time while companies make and distribute vaccines and drugs.

Because the virus is spread by small droplets passed within about three feet (1 meter) from person to person, keeping people apart is considered a possible strategy.

The U.S. government flu plan calls for similar measures, including allowing employees to stay home for weeks or even months, telecommuting and closing schools and perhaps large office buildings.

The Lifeboat Foundation has a bioshield project

Here at the Lifeboat Foundation, we are pondering a website redesign. Are there any professional web designers in the audience who might be able to devote some evening/weekend time to brainstorming possible improvements and implementing them? If so, please get in contact with me via email.

Here is a small banner to put on your site if you want to link to us:

And one more:

Also, we are looking for any graphic artists to help with ads and the like.

Thanks for your help!

Never underestimate the power of a “do-over.”

Video gamers know exactly what I’m talking about: the ability to face a challenge over and over again, in most cases with a “reset” of the environment to the initial conditions of the fight (or trap, or puzzle, etc.). With a consistent situation and setting, the player is able to experiment with different strategies. Typically, the player will find the approach that works, succeed, then move on to the next challenge; occasionally, the player will try different winning strategies in order to find the one with the best results, putting the player in a better position to meet the next obstacle.

Real life, of course, doesn’t have do-overs. But one of the fascinating results of the increasing sophistication of virtual world and game environments is their ability to serve as proxies for the real world, allowing users to practice tasks and ideas in a sufficiently realistic setting that the results provide useful real life lessons. This capability is based upon virtual worlds being interactive systems, where one’s actions have consequences; these consequences, in turn, require new choices. The utility of the virtual world as a rehearsal system is dependent upon the plausibility of the underlying model of reality, but even simplified systems can elicit new insights.

The classic example of this is Sim City (which I’ve written about at length before), but with the so-called “serious games” movement, we’re seeing the overlap of gaming and rehearsal become increasingly common.

The latest example is particularly interesting to me. The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction group has teamed up with the UK game design studio Playerthree to create the Flash-based “Stop Disasters” game. The goal of the game is to reduce the harmful results of catastrophic natural events — the disaster that gets stopped isn’t the event itself, but its impact on human life.

The game mechanisms are fairly straightforward. The player chooses what kind of disaster is to be faced (earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, wildfire or flood), then has a limited amount of time to prepare for the inevitable. The player can build new buildings, retrofit or demolish old ones, install appropriate defensive infrastructure (such as mangroves along tsunami-prone shorelines or firebreaks around water towers), institute preparedness training, install sirens and evacuation signs, and so forth — all with a limited budget, and with ancillary goals that must be met for success, such as building schools and hospitals for community development, or bringing in hotels for local economic support.

Once the money is spent (or the time runs out), the preordained disaster strikes, and the player gets to see whether his or her choices were the right ones. At the easy level, there’s generally enough money to protect the small map and limited population; at the harder levels, the player must make difficult choices about who and what to save. The overall complexity reminds me of the very first version of Sim City, but don’t take that as a criticism: the first Sim City arguably offered the clearest demonstration of urban complexity of the four versions, in large measure because of its spartan interface and simplicity.

Stop Disasters is billed as a children’s game, and it’s true that the folks at Architecture for Humanity aren’t going to use it for planning purposes. That’s not the goal, of course. This isn’t a rehearsal tool for the people who have to plan for disasters, but for the people who have to live with that planning — and those people who will choose to help their communities during large-scale emergencies.

I suspect that there would be an audience for a more complex version of Stop Disasters, one which puts more demands on the player to accommodate citizen needs. It’s a bit too easy to simply demolish old buildings rather than retrofit them in the UN/ISDR game, for example, and I would love to see more economic tools. I’d also like to see a wider array of disasters, beyond the short, sharp, shock events of quakes and storms. What would a Stop Disaster global warming scenario look like, for example — not trying to prevent climate change, but to deal with its consequences?

If we really want to get our hands dirty, we’d need to build up Stop Disasters scenarios for the advent of molecular manufacturing, self-aware artificial intelligence, global pandemic, peak oil and asteroid strikes.

Not because such games would tell us what we should do, but because they’d help us see how our choices could play out — and, more importantly, they’d remind us that our choices matter.

Mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge, who coined the term “Singularity”, is an advocate of the Lifeboat Foundation’s mission: get some people off the Earth and get them self-sustaining as soon as possible, as an insurance policy against existential risk. In his “What if the Singularity does not happen?” talk for the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, Vinge calls the continuing pursuit of space under current-day launch costs as a “sham”:

Well, launch to LEO still runs $5000 to $10000/kg. As far as I can tell, the new Vision for Space Exploration will maintain these costs. This approach made some sense in 1970, when we were just beginning and when initial surveys of the problems and applications were worth almost any expense. Now, in the early 21st century, these launch costs make talk of humans-in-space a doubly gold-plated sham:

    • First, because of the pitiful limitations on delivered payloads, except at prices that are politically impossible (or are deniable promises about future plans).
    • Second, because with these launch costs, the payloads must be enormously more reliable and compact than commercial off-the-shelf hardware — and therefore enormously expensive in their own right.

I believe most people have great sympathy and enthusiasm for humans-in-space. They really “get” the big picture. Unfortunately, their sympathy and enthusiasm has been abused.

Humankind’s presence in space is essential to long-term human survival.

That is why I urge that we reject any major humans-in-space initiative that does not have the prerequisite goal of much cheaper (at least by a factor of ten) access to space.

We at Lifeboat Foundation wholeheartedly agree. A self-sustaining space station, which could weigh thousands or even millions of tons (the International Space Station weighs 235 tons), must be built out of components either harvested in space or launched for costs less than an order of magnitude than the current costs. We’re coming to a point in history where these expensive launches are just a waste. Why invest billions in going to Mars when we can’t even get out of our own atmosphere for anything less than millions of dollars? We have to put investment towards better approaches to launch. Superconducting maglev or mass driver approaches likely hold the key.