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Sherlock Holmes: On the Trail of Coronavirus
By Shlomo Maital
Why didn’t we think of it sooner? Let’s enlist the famous detective Sherlock Holmes to track down the coronavirus. I know – he’s a fictional character, invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But wait – Sherlock is real!
Not exactly the London sleuth. But Sherlock Biosciences, the hi-tech company specializing in CRISP-R technology in diagnostics. Sherlock Biosciences has a test for COVID-19 that is fast, accurate – and may be a game-changer.
The Sherlock™ CRISPR SARS-CoV-2 kit is the first US FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) CRISPR-based diagnostic test intended for the qualitative detection of nucleic acid from SARS-CoV-2.
So – first, what is CRISP-R? It’s a technique for editing genes – using an amazing enzyme, CRISP-R snips a specific gene out of DNA – in order to study it, or replace it or repair it or detect it.
Sherlock’s founders gathered their team together, early in the pandemic, and told them, Pivot! (change direction). Can we use our technology, used to diagnose a variety of afflictions, to test for COVID-19? And literally, physically, the scientists pivoted – swiveled their chairs, turned to their computers – and went to work.
And they succeeded!
Here is how it works. CRISP-R snips out a piece of the Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) from the coronavirus swab, if that RNA exists. The technology then identifies the presence of that RNA and signals that the test is positive – yes, the patient does have the coronavirus. It first multiplies the snippet of RNA, so there is a lot of it – and then tests for its nature.
There is a huge problem with current COVID-19 tests. They take a very very long time to produce the results, as labs are over-burdened, and many have excessively large false positive and false negative. False positive is unpleasant – false negative is downright dangerous, leaving people to walk around and spread the virus, unwittingly.
Sherlock is a Cambridge MA based bioscience company, linked to MIT. I hope they will willingly and rapidly share their technology widely, so that the world – waiting for a vaccine – will at least be able to test instantly and accurately whether people are ill..
How MIT Nurtured Entrepreneurs: by Ed Roberts
By Shlomo Maital
Professor Edward Roberts
Edward B. Roberts. Celebrating Entrepreneurs: How MIT Nurtured Pioneering Entrepreneurs Who Built Great Companies. Amazon website.
Life goes on. Scholars are still writing and publishing books. And this one, by my mentor and friend Ed Roberts, who founded and still chairs the MIT entrepreneurship program, is highly relevant. Because as we emerge from coronavirus, we will need to rebuild our economies. A major role will be played by high-energy creative entrepreneurs – of the kind Ed has nurtured, fostered, mentored, taught, cajoled, taught, reprimanded (he practices tough love), praised and energized.
You’ll find the book of great interest, especially its five chapters filled with in-depth interviews and background on the MIT “spinoff startups” who became the leaders of: the life sciences and biotechnology industry, the Internet, from CAD-CAM to robotics, and even “modern finance”, plus a host of other diverse firms. The book contains a major portion on MIT’s long engagements with several countries, including years with Israel, in helping to create and build its high-technology entrepreneurial sector.
Incidentally, Ed notes “ALL author proceeds from the sale of Celebrating Entrepreneurs will be donated directly to MIT endowment funds that support the Institute-wide MIT Entrepreneurship Pogram”, which will really help to sustain and further develop MIT’s ambitious efforts on behalf of future entrepreneurs.”
Inspired by Ed, I’ve joined others at my university, Technion, to foster entrepreneurship, ever since 1987, when I and 2011 Nobel Laureate Dan Shechtman launched a general studies course on startups, featuring entrepreneurs who came to tell their story (like Jewish meatballs, both sweet and sour). You can read my survey of research on fostering entrepreneurship in universities, download it at https://www.neaman.org.il/Can-universities-foster-students-intent-to-become-entrepreneurs or email me at smaital@tx.technion.ac.il
And a final note. Ed gave me the chance to teach MIT Management of Technology students, R&D engineers from all over the world, in 1984. I recall my first attempt was disaster. But Ed gave me a second chance the following summer. Ever since, inspired by Ed and MIT, I’ve pursued a passionate interest in creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship – the engines that have made the people of Israel prosperous. As consultant to some of Israel’s leading high-tech companies (including Iscar, now a global giant owned by Warren Buffett), Ed contributed directly to the birth and growth of Israeli hi-tech.
Thank you, Ed!
CRISPR Will Change Our Lives
By Shlomo Maital
Some time ago, I wrote about a technology known as Blockchain that will undoubtedly change our lives – and has already. Blockchain is simply a way to record transactions, that is secure, unhackable and ‘disintermediated’ (no need for banks or other financial middlemen). It is now widely used to create digital money.
Now comes CRISPR. It stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. What is it? Simply, a way of editing genes – like we edit blogs or emails. Erase this group of words. Replace it with another, better one. In the case of DNA: “Erase” (snip away) this (bad) piece of DNA, a gene that causes problems – and replace with a ‘good’ gene, that will not cause disease or problems.
A palindrome is a word that reads the same forward and backward. E.g. “civic”. So pieces of DNA are inserted into longer pieces, such that the inserted pieces read the same forward or backward, so it doesn’t matter which way they are inserted. The method originated with studying how viruses ‘snip’ DNA – and using viruses to do the same in constructive way.
We now know the genetic causes of many diseases. But until now we have not had the ability to repair bad genes. Now CRISPR makes it possible. This will create an entirely new branch of medicine, immunotherapy, in which gene therapy is used to both treat illness, when identified, and mainly, to prevent it — an individual can now have his or her genome analyzed, and potential ‘bad’ genes identified. No point in doing this, so far, because there was no real way to ‘edit’ bad genes. Now, with CRISPR, there is.
I would like to mention one of the scientists responsible for CRISPR, the young MIT scientist Feng Zhang. He was born in China and is only 36; he does research at the famous Broad (pronounced Brode) institute in Cambridge, MA. Increasingly bright foreign students are encountering US visa problems and are going elsewhere, e.g. Canada. It is America’s loss.
The Era of False News: Why We All Must Think Critically
By Shlomo Maital
Today’s New York Times (“False News Really Does Spread Like Wildfire”, by Steve Lohr) asks a tough question: “What if the scourge of false news …is not …[Russians or bots]? What if the main problem is us?”
People are the principle culprits. You and me. This is the result of extensive MIT research of false news (they prefer that term to Trump’s ‘fake news’). “True stories were rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the top 1 % of false stories were routinely shared by 1,000 to 100,000 people. And it took true stories about six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people”.
We humans are responsible. Because false news is almost always more sensational, more livid, than true. So we rush to share it. The research of Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan School of Management, appeared in Science magazine.
So what can you and I, what MUST you and I, do? I think it is simple. Back to basics. Back to John Dewey. Back to Einstein. We have to learn again how to think.
I have been a college professor for over 50 years. In that time, did I teach my students, facts, concepts, tools? Or did I teach them how to think critically, including about what I am telling them? I don’t think I did a very job in training them in one of today’s most crucial skills, knowing to tell truth from falsehood.
Knowledge today has a short half-life. And in any case, knowledge can be found quickly, by anyone, using digital tools. But the ability to think, to sort fact from fiction, truth from lies — that has a very long half life. And that skill is the pillar of any democratic system. Because otherwise , scoundrels can get elected by telling us lies – and they do it all the time now.
Increasingly, people watch media, conventional and social, only when they agree with what it tells them. Critical thinking is anesthetized. This has to stop. We have to teach our kids to analyze, weigh, criticize, critique, challenge. We have to teach ourselves. In a world where this skill is more widespread, the Russians will simply draw a blank – and give up. And in a world where Trump says to Canada’s PM: “US has a trade deficit with Canada” (false), and later gloats that he just made it up (US has an overall trade surplus with Canada, it takes 3 seconds to check this), when the leader of the Free World doesn’t care if what he says is true or false, not does his base, it is incumbent upon us, every human being, to care a whole lot more.
How “You’re Out of Your Mind!” Won a Nobel Prize
By Shlomo Maital
Cultivate wild ideas! This is a proven path for changing the world, and, perhaps, for winning a Nobel Prize in Physics.
Profs. Weiss, Barish and Thorne have won the 2017 Nobel for Physics. They won it for empirically demonstrating the existence of “gravity waves”, predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago. According to The New York Times:
These waves would stretch and compress space in orthogonal directions as they went by, the same way that sound waves compress air. They had never been directly seen when Dr. Weiss and, independently, Ron Drever, then at the University of Glasgow, following work by others, suggested detecting the waves by using lasers to monitor the distance between a pair of mirrors.
In 1975, Dr. Weiss and Dr. Thorne, then a well-known gravitational theorist, stayed up all night in a hotel room brainstorming gravitational wave experiments during a meeting in Washington. Dr. Thorne went home and hired Dr. Drever to help develop and build a laser-based gravitational-wave detector at Caltech. Meanwhile, Dr. Weiss was doing the same thing at M.I.T. The technological odds were against both of them. The researchers calculated that a typical gravitational wave from out in space would change the distance between the mirrors by an almost imperceptible amount: one part in a billion trillion, less than the diameter of a proton. Dr. Weiss recalled that when he explained the experiment to his potential funders at the National Science Foundation, “everybody thought we were out of our minds.”
The breakthrough research combined a wild idea (empirically measuring gravity waves) with a feet-on-the-ground project to measure them. The most advanced version of LIGO Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory had just started up in September 2015 when the vibrations from a pair of colliding black holes slammed the detectors in Louisiana and Washington with a rising tone, or “chirp,” for a fifth of a second.
Barish knew how to manage Big Science projects, like LIGO; Weiss and Thorne had the wild idea of measuring tiny tiny waves, an “out of your mind” idea. And the National Science Foundation provided the needed resources. Presto – Nobel.
Weiss and Thorne are MIT professors; Barish is from Caltech.
How to Help Creative People: Be (Or Support) Claude Shannon’s
By Shlomo Maital
Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (1916- 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer. He invented what we today call known as “information theory” – the foundation of software, computers and cell phone technology.
According to Wikipedia: “Shannon is noted for having founded information theory with a landmark paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, that he published in 1948. He is, perhaps, equally well known for founding digital circuit design theory in 1937, when—as a 21-year-old master’s degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical, numerical relationship.” In other words, you can do anything with 0,1.
NATURE magazine (July 13 2017, p. 159) has a review of a new book about Shannon, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon invented the Information Age. The review is written by Vint Cerf, who designed the architecture of the Internet.
At the close of his review, Cerf notes: “What emerges is a portrait of an exceptional free-spirited mind, nurtured by colleagues at MIT and Bell Labs….he was protected from some of the more mundane aspects of work, such as reporting progress, by colleagues and managers. They recognized his unique ability to wrestle insight from complexity, by peeling away details that obscured the kernel of problems and inviting creative solutions”.
What I learn from this is: Be like Shannon. Strip away the humdrum things you do, and focus on big problems, on the core of the problem. Peter Drucker taught “Innovation and Abandonment” and he began with ‘abandonment’. That is, what can you get rid of in your life that takes away time and energy from your creative powers? How can you be like Shannon?
And, next best, if you cannot be like Shannon, can you identify and support other people around you who are like Shannon? Supporting other creative people may be as important as being creative yourself.
Mildred Dresselhaus, 1930-2017
By Shlomo Maital
Mildred Dresselhaus
On Feb. 20, MIT Professor of physics and electrical engineering, Mildred Dresselhaus, passed away at her home in Cambridge, MA. She was 86. Born Mildred Spiewak, she was the very first female Institute Professor at MIT (an Institute Professor is a super-distinguished professor).
Dresselhaus was known as the Queen of Carbon, in scientific circles. She used magnetic fields and lasers to map out the electric structure of carbon and found that by stitching in alkali materials, carbon can become a superconductor. She pioneered in researching “buckyballs” (fullerenes), soccer-ball shaped cages of carbon atoms, widely used for drug delivery, lubricants and catalysts. She also had the idea of rolling a single layer of carbon atoms into a hollow tube, the nanotube, making a structure with the strength of steel but just 1/10,000th the width of a human hair.
Dresselhaus published over 1,700 scientific papers. Her life was one of struggle and perseverance. She was the daughter of poor Jewish immigrants from Poland, and grew up in the Bronx. She went through university on scholarship.
She once recounted, according to the New York Times, “my early years were spent in a dangerous multiracial low-income neighborhood. My early elementary school memories up through ninth grade are of teachers struggling to maintain class discipline with occasional coverage of academics”. From age 6, she travelled long distances on the subway. She got in to Hunter High School, in Manhattan, and then Hunter College. Her lifelong mentor was Nobel Laureate Rosalyn Yalow, from whom she took an elementary physics course.
Why did she choose to study carbon? Because it was unpopular and considered uninteresting, she observed. She and her husband were hired by MIT in 1960, because MIT was one of the few places that would hire a husband and wife team. At Lincoln Labs, she was one of only two women, out of a scientific staff of 1,000.
She is survived by her husband Gene, and four children, Marianne, Carl, Paul and Eliot, and five grandchildren. She will be remembered as the first woman to secure a full professorship at MIT, in 1968, and she worked “very vigorously to ensure she would not be the last”, observed Natalie Angier, in the New York Times.
Alone with our Phones: the Downside of Cellular
By Shlomo Maital
Will dependence on devices mean we no longer know how to engage, befriend and converse with live humans? Will IoT kill empathy?
In her latest book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and clinical psychologist, decries the decline of simple human contact.
“We’re talking all the time,” she writes. “We text, post and chat. …Among family and friends, we turn to our phones instead of each other.”
The result? “Our young people would rather send an electronic message than commit to a face-to-face meeting or even a telephone call.” The resulting “flight from conversation” damages what is most human about us – our ability to form relationships, empathize, sympathize, understand, collaborate.
In the world of IoT, will ‘things’ communicate in place of people? And will we as a result lose much of our essential humanity?
The 2013 movie “Her” follows Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, as he falls in love with Samantha, a computer operating system, whose silky voice is that of Scarlett Johansson. Are we already falling in love with our ‘things’? I am told that depriving teenagers of their cell phones, as a punishment, is regarded by them as life-threatening.
Every new technology has its downside. Cellular technology enables us to communicate with everyone, everywhere, any time, all the time. This is a great boon. But it is also destroying our ability to relate to other human beings.
How can we reap the benefits of ubiquitous smart phones (according to TIME magazine, a year ago, most people now surf the Web with their phones, not tablets or PC’s), without the downside that Turkle depicts?
Raise the U.S. Minimum Wage – Now!
By Shlomo Maital
Have you wondered, why low-paid American workers, who lost well-paying jobs in manufacturing to Asia and instead got low-paying jobs in services, like fast foods, have been so passive under exploitation and poverty?
No longer. A spontaneous group of fast food workers has organized, using social networks, and have mounted demonstrations in major cities. Many earn minimum wage, which in some places is $7.50 an hour. That means you get $30 a week for a 40 hour work week, or $120 a month — $14,400 a year. Nobody can survive on that.
Is that what they are worth? Is that commensurate, as economists say, with the value of the marginal product of their labor? I doubt it, given Macdonald’s fat profits.
But wait! If you raise the minimum wage, you will cause more unemployment and hardship, because the higher the price of something, the less is the demand. Right?
Here is what Zeynep Ton writes in Fortune (he’s an adjunct associate professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits).
I studied four retail chains that manage (to pay workers more than minimum wages); Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip (a U.S. chain of convenience stores with gas stations), and Mercadona (Spain’s largest supermarket chain). They offer their employees much better jobs than their competitors, all the while keeping their prices low and performing well in all the ways that matter to any business. They have high productivity, great customer service, healthy growth, and excellent returns to their investors. They compete head-on with companies that spend far less on their employees, and they win.
Zeynet Ton notes: “Nearly one fifth of American workers work in retail and fast food, and they have bad jobs. They earn poverty-level wages, have unpredictable schedules that make it hard to hold on to a second job, and have few opportunities for success and growth. These are not just people who are uneducated or unskilled. In 2010 more than a third of all working adults with jobs that did not pay a living wage had at least some college education or a degree.”
It’s simple. To boost a flagging economy, put more income into the hands of those who need it; they spend it, creating demand, more jobs, and by Keynes’ multiplier effect, economic growth.
Does this sound more logical than the European no-brain austerity program? And, if nothing else, more fair?
The Three Intersecting Circles of Innovation
By Shlomo Maital
My attention was recently drawn to a three-year-old report, done by MIT scholars, for the health science research community. The report is The Thid Revolution: The Convergence of the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering. The authors, which include stellar figures like Profs. Phillip Sharp and Robert Langer, argue that “convergence will be the emerging paradigm for how medical research will be conducted in the future.”
In order for this convergence to happen, they say, we will not “not simply collaboration between disciplines but true disciplinary integration.”
Today, the structure of nearly all the universities in the world is obsolete, ancient, creaky and counterproductive. It is based on faculties, which are silos that work in direct opposition to convergence. The exceptions are research institutes that are cross-disciplinary, specifically nanotechnology. My university has a Nanotechnology Center that draws scholars from many disciplines, and the resulting integration has been tremendously productive. A small example: Prof. Hossam Haick, whose discipline is chemical engineering, but who has harnessed nanotechnology, electronics, chemistry, physics and engineering to produce an ‘electronic nose’, which can sniff cancer molecules, for instance. He recently delivered the first course in Arabic, on Coursera, on nanotechnology.
Structure is not strategy, it is sometimes said. But, sometimes it is. Let’s change the structure of universities. Let’s find a way to restructure them, so that each faculty member has a very clear area of expertise, a clearly-defined discipline, but also has broad knowledge of other fields and above all, works as part of a convergence interdisciplinary team. And for this to work, their offices have to be adjacent…. Despite IT and networking, nothing beats face-to-face conversations over coffee.
Convergence poses a big challenge to those who would innovate. You need to achieve two conflicting goals, both of which are highly challenging.
First, as Nobel Laureate Dan Shechtman repeatedly urges, you must become expert, truly expert, at SOMEthing…. his expertise was in electron microscopy, and it enabled him to overcome fierce opposition to his discoveries, and ultimately win the big prize. You need deep knowledge in at least one field or sub-field.
Second, you need to become curious and learn a great many things about a great many fields, not in depth but sufficient to understand them. You need wide knowledge, surface knowledge, in just about everything. Even if you have team members who have deep knowledge, it still helps a lot to innovate if you have basic understanding of other, distant disciplines.
In future, all the major breakthroughs will occur at the point of convergence among several disciplines. In order for you, innovator, to be there, you need to acquire depth, and breadth.
Good luck!
TIMnovate 