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Sea change
OPINION
Not so fast The rush to change UK law to allow “three-person IVF” is troubling, argue Donna Dickenson and Marcy Darnovsky PRESSURE is mounting to amend UK law to permit the creation of so-called three-parent babies. There are reasons to be worried about this. For a start, it involves human germ-line modification, in which DNA is changed and the change remains inheritable – something banned in dozens of countries. Secondly, many safety questions remain. The method used is often called “mitochondrial transfer”. In fact it is the nucleus that is transferred from one woman’s egg into another woman’s egg that has had its nucleus removed. The result is a child with DNA from two women and one man. Why do this? Because mitochondria, which help make energy in cells, have their own DNA separate from that in the nucleus. Children inherit this DNA only from their mother, so if her mitochondria are faulty, the
child can develop serious illness. Three-parent techniques are being proposed to prevent this from happening. If it all worked perfectly, women with faulty mitochondrial genes would be able to bear an unaffected and mostly genetically related baby. The UK government has drafted regulations to allow this in people and needs to win a free vote in Parliament later this year to make them official. The UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is supportive. Its latest review of the science, out last week, concluded that the techniques are “not unsafe”, but it said that there are still critical experiments that should be completed prior to human use. That need was made more explicit by recent US Food and Drug Administration hearings, which raised questions over safety, including the effects of
Sea change Politicians are waking up to ocean acidification but it may be too late, says Roger Harrabin I HAVE gazed into the future of the tropical oceans, and it’s not a reassuring sight. In Papua New Guinea, the Ring of Fire has bestowed a unique gift on science – an underwater vent of pure carbon dioxide. Normally researchers projecting the effect of rising CO2 must rely on computer models. But here they 28 | NewScientist | 14 June 2014
can observe it for real as the CO2 bubbles dissolve to form carbonic acid, creating on a small scale the conditions expected globally by the end of the century. At first it is a beguiling sight through a diver’s mask. The parcels of CO2 are silvered by the sunlight as they wobble towards the surface. But then the eye
wanders to the background. The Beyond this natural laboratory reef is miserably depleted. Tough the full effects of rising CO2 are still hard to predict. But we do boulder corals survive, but the most spectacular branching corals know that the current rate of change in sea chemistry is and table corals that provide 10 times faster than the last great breeding grounds for fish are acidification event caused by missing. Research suggests more volcanic activity 56 million years than a third of coral species will ago – an event that appears to ultimately be wiped out. Just a few hundred metres away, have contributed to serious ecological disruption. an unpolluted reef acts as a Some major politicians are scientific control. Adorned by waking up to “the other CO2 more than 500 species of coral, it problem”. US Secretary of State is a carnival of life and colour. This tale of two reefs enables “The current rate of change researchers to draw conclusions in ocean chemistry is 10 about which creatures will thrive times faster than the last with the shift in ocean chemistry great acidification event” and which will perish.
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Donna Dickenson is emeritus professor of medical ethics at the University of London. Marcy Darnovsky heads the US Center for Genetics and Society
John Kerry will make ocean acidification a key theme of his Our Ocean conference in Washington DC next week. He is likely to offer funds for a monitoring network to track the rate of acidification. But the proposed carbon cuts from power stations announced by President Obama won’t be enough to prevent severe acidification, even if China and other nations play their part. The future lies beneath the waves in Papua New Guinea, if anyone cares to look. ■ Roger Harrabin is a BBC environment analyst. He tweets as @rharrabin
ONE MINUTE INTERVIEW
The way to lovable robots Looking at the cartoon and film characters we love can give clues to designing engaging robots, says roboticist Derek Scherer assuming the role of puppeteer more than autonomous systems designer. After all, it is nothing more than replacing the puppeteer’s hand with motors. That’s a tough pill to swallow for some engineers. Will mimicry appeal or will it seem unoriginal? It isn’t so much about mimicry as making more interesting robots by taking lessons from centuries of theatre and animation. Bugs Bunny was not designed to look like a regular rabbit, or a slightly altered human: they created a brand new character because the artists decided painstakingly, through iteration and development, what would have the most pull for the audience.
PROFILE Derek Scherer is a former US army robotics engineer. He now works on special effects animatronics for character robots in movies through his Kansas City firm Golem Group. His film work includes Man of Steel and The Hobbit
Humanoid robots aren’t very charismatic yet. Will we want to share our lives with them? A companion robot is something you’ll want to have because it does valuable work for you – but only if it also has an engaging character and personality, entertaining you through the way it interacts. Otherwise it will be no more interesting than a washing machine. What is going to make robots so engaging? We need look no further than the entertainment industry – TV, movies, animation and video games – to see how lifelike a synthetic creature can be. Think of Pikachu in Pokémon, or Bugs Bunny. A robot with their character traits would be pretty engaging. My perfect service robot would have the chipperness of Kermit the Frog, for instance. What do we need to make that happen? A change in attitude on the part of roboticists, who need to realise that when designing character robots with big personalities, they are
So what characteristics of, say, Kermit would you program into a domestic robot? Kermit has a resiliency I like – when he’s knocked down, he gets back up. He’s got a great attitude. There is an element of slapstick, too: the giant clapping mouth, and not much room for a brain case – these are endearing features. Kermit isn’t completely dumb, but of course he is not on our level. When robots do work for us, we won’t want them to be smarter than us – a more intelligent robot is not actually a more endearing robot. What other characters have you considered as good models for companion robots? Dobby the house elf, from the Harry Potter movies. If we took a servant robot, we could give it a Dobby personality. Well, maybe with a bit less self-flagellation than the movie Dobby [laughs]. But he’s loving, has character and a personality, and seems biological. He has all the right traits. If robots start to become autonomous, will designers no longer be pulling the strings? Akin to puppeteers, we are still directing the movement and sounds and appearance of the robot to create this entertaining experience. If the system later becomes autonomous, you will have still played the role of puppet master. Interview by Paul Marks
14 June 2014 | NewScientist | 29
ROBERT STENBERG
remnants of faulty mitochondrial DNA persisting despite the procedure, and the disruption of links between mitochondrial genes and those in the nucleus. These hearings concluded that the science is not yet advanced enough to warrant human trials. A further issue is that pregnancy and childbirth pose extra health risks for women with serious mitochondrial disorders. Despite the US’s stance and the HFEA call for more checks before use, the UK government wants to change the law without delay to permit the technique. Officials say the aims are to enable safe and effective treatment for women at high risk of having a baby with a severe mitochondrial disease, and to flag a desire to be at the cutting edge of medical techniques. However, if the safety evidence is lacking and if the handful of beneficiaries could be put at risk, that only leaves one reason for lifting the ban post-haste: positioning the UK at the forefront of scientific research on this. But as any spaghetti western aficionado knows, the frontier can be a lonely and dangerous place. ■
Not so fast The rush to change UK law to allow “three-person IVF” is troubling, argue Donna Dickenson and Marcy Darnovsky PRESSURE is mounting to amend UK law to permit the creation of so-called three-parent babies. There are reasons to be worried about this. For a start, it involves human germ-line modification, in which DNA is changed and the change remains inheritable – something banned in dozens of countries. Secondly, many safety questions remain. The method used is often called “mitochondrial transfer”. In fact it is the nucleus that is transferred from one woman’s egg into another woman’s egg that has had its nucleus removed. The result is a child with DNA from two women and one man. Why do this? Because mitochondria, which help make energy in cells, have their own DNA separate from that in the nucleus. Children inherit this DNA only from their mother, so if her mitochondria are faulty, the
child can develop serious illness. Three-parent techniques are being proposed to prevent this from happening. If it all worked perfectly, women with faulty mitochondrial genes would be able to bear an unaffected and mostly genetically related baby. The UK government has drafted regulations to allow this in people and needs to win a free vote in Parliament later this year to make them official. The UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is supportive. Its latest review of the science, out last week, concluded that the techniques are “not unsafe”, but it said that there are still critical experiments that should be completed prior to human use. That need was made more explicit by recent US Food and Drug Administration hearings, which raised questions over safety, including the effects of
Sea change Politicians are waking up to ocean acidification but it may be too late, says Roger Harrabin I HAVE gazed into the future of the tropical oceans, and it’s not a reassuring sight. In Papua New Guinea, the Ring of Fire has bestowed a unique gift on science – an underwater vent of pure carbon dioxide. Normally researchers projecting the effect of rising CO2 must rely on computer models. But here they 28 | NewScientist | 14 June 2014
can observe it for real as the CO2 bubbles dissolve to form carbonic acid, creating on a small scale the conditions expected globally by the end of the century. At first it is a beguiling sight through a diver’s mask. The parcels of CO2 are silvered by the sunlight as they wobble towards the surface. But then the eye
wanders to the background. The Beyond this natural laboratory reef is miserably depleted. Tough the full effects of rising CO2 are still hard to predict. But we do boulder corals survive, but the most spectacular branching corals know that the current rate of change in sea chemistry is and table corals that provide 10 times faster than the last great breeding grounds for fish are acidification event caused by missing. Research suggests more volcanic activity 56 million years than a third of coral species will ago – an event that appears to ultimately be wiped out. Just a few hundred metres away, have contributed to serious ecological disruption. an unpolluted reef acts as a Some major politicians are scientific control. Adorned by waking up to “the other CO2 more than 500 species of coral, it problem”. US Secretary of State is a carnival of life and colour. This tale of two reefs enables “The current rate of change researchers to draw conclusions in ocean chemistry is 10 about which creatures will thrive times faster than the last with the shift in ocean chemistry great acidification event” and which will perish.
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Donna Dickenson is emeritus professor of medical ethics at the University of London. Marcy Darnovsky heads the US Center for Genetics and Society
John Kerry will make ocean acidification a key theme of his Our Ocean conference in Washington DC next week. He is likely to offer funds for a monitoring network to track the rate of acidification. But the proposed carbon cuts from power stations announced by President Obama won’t be enough to prevent severe acidification, even if China and other nations play their part. The future lies beneath the waves in Papua New Guinea, if anyone cares to look. ■ Roger Harrabin is a BBC environment analyst. He tweets as @rharrabin
ONE MINUTE INTERVIEW
The way to lovable robots Looking at the cartoon and film characters we love can give clues to designing engaging robots, says roboticist Derek Scherer assuming the role of puppeteer more than autonomous systems designer. After all, it is nothing more than replacing the puppeteer’s hand with motors. That’s a tough pill to swallow for some engineers. Will mimicry appeal or will it seem unoriginal? It isn’t so much about mimicry as making more interesting robots by taking lessons from centuries of theatre and animation. Bugs Bunny was not designed to look like a regular rabbit, or a slightly altered human: they created a brand new character because the artists decided painstakingly, through iteration and development, what would have the most pull for the audience.
PROFILE Derek Scherer is a former US army robotics engineer. He now works on special effects animatronics for character robots in movies through his Kansas City firm Golem Group. His film work includes Man of Steel and The Hobbit
Humanoid robots aren’t very charismatic yet. Will we want to share our lives with them? A companion robot is something you’ll want to have because it does valuable work for you – but only if it also has an engaging character and personality, entertaining you through the way it interacts. Otherwise it will be no more interesting than a washing machine. What is going to make robots so engaging? We need look no further than the entertainment industry – TV, movies, animation and video games – to see how lifelike a synthetic creature can be. Think of Pikachu in Pokémon, or Bugs Bunny. A robot with their character traits would be pretty engaging. My perfect service robot would have the chipperness of Kermit the Frog, for instance. What do we need to make that happen? A change in attitude on the part of roboticists, who need to realise that when designing character robots with big personalities, they are
So what characteristics of, say, Kermit would you program into a domestic robot? Kermit has a resiliency I like – when he’s knocked down, he gets back up. He’s got a great attitude. There is an element of slapstick, too: the giant clapping mouth, and not much room for a brain case – these are endearing features. Kermit isn’t completely dumb, but of course he is not on our level. When robots do work for us, we won’t want them to be smarter than us – a more intelligent robot is not actually a more endearing robot. What other characters have you considered as good models for companion robots? Dobby the house elf, from the Harry Potter movies. If we took a servant robot, we could give it a Dobby personality. Well, maybe with a bit less self-flagellation than the movie Dobby [laughs]. But he’s loving, has character and a personality, and seems biological. He has all the right traits. If robots start to become autonomous, will designers no longer be pulling the strings? Akin to puppeteers, we are still directing the movement and sounds and appearance of the robot to create this entertaining experience. If the system later becomes autonomous, you will have still played the role of puppet master. Interview by Paul Marks
14 June 2014 | NewScientist | 29
ROBERT STENBERG
remnants of faulty mitochondrial DNA persisting despite the procedure, and the disruption of links between mitochondrial genes and those in the nucleus. These hearings concluded that the science is not yet advanced enough to warrant human trials. A further issue is that pregnancy and childbirth pose extra health risks for women with serious mitochondrial disorders. Despite the US’s stance and the HFEA call for more checks before use, the UK government wants to change the law without delay to permit the technique. Officials say the aims are to enable safe and effective treatment for women at high risk of having a baby with a severe mitochondrial disease, and to flag a desire to be at the cutting edge of medical techniques. However, if the safety evidence is lacking and if the handful of beneficiaries could be put at risk, that only leaves one reason for lifting the ban post-haste: positioning the UK at the forefront of scientific research on this. But as any spaghetti western aficionado knows, the frontier can be a lonely and dangerous place. ■