Category: Britain

Scientists Invest Much Money and Time to Develop Machines Able to Sniff as Well as a Dog

Seven years have passed since the article quoted below predicted that sniffing devices would be available to clinicians in three to five years. I believe the prediction was premature. In the meantime, we should be making more and better use of dog noses to sniff out disease.

(p. D5) But not every physician’s nose is a precision instrument, and dogs, while adept at sniffing out cancer, get distracted. So researchers have been trying for decades to figure out how to build an inexpensive odor sensor for quick, reliable and noninvasive diagnoses.

. . .

“You’re seeing a convergence of technology now, so we can actually run large-scale clinical studies to get the data to prove odor analysis has real utility,” said Billy Boyle, co-founder and president of operations at Owlstone, a manufacturer of chemical sensors in Cambridge, England.

Mr. Boyle, an electronics engineer, formed the company with two friends in 2004 to develop sensors to detect chemical weapons and explosives for customers, including the United States government. But when Mr. Boyle’s girlfriend and eventual wife, Kate Gross, was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2012, his focus shifted to medical sensors, with an emphasis on cancer detection.

Ms. Gross died at the end of 2014. That she might still be alive if her cancer had been detected earlier, Mr. Boyle said, continues to be a “big motivator.”

. . .

A similar diagnostic technology is being developed by an Israeli chemical engineer, Hossam Haick, who was also touched by cancer.

“My college roommate had leukemia, and it made me want to see whether a sensor could be used for treatment,” said Mr. Haick, a professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. “But then I realized early diagnosis could be as important as treatment itself.”

. . .

In the United States, a team of researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the University of Pennsylvania received an $815,000 grant in February [2017] from the Kleberg Foundation to advance work on a prototype odor sensor that detects ovarian cancer in samples of blood plasma.

. . .

“We are trying to make the device work the way we understand mammalian olfaction works,” said Charlie Johnson, director of the Nano/Bio Interface Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who is leading the fabrication effort. “DNA gives unique characteristics for this process.”

In addition to these groups, teams in Austria, Switzerland and Japan also are developing odor sensors to diagnose disease.

“I think the fact that you’re seeing so much activity both in commercial and academic settings shows that we’re getting a lot closer,” said Cristina Davis, a biomedical engineer and professor at the University of California, Davis, who also is helping to develop an odor sensor to diagnose disease.

“My estimate is it’s a three- to five-year time frame” before such tools are available to clinicians, she added.

For the full story see:

Kate Murphy. “The Race to Sniff Out Disease.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 2, 2017 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 1, 2017 [sic], and has the title “One Day, a Machine Will Smell Whether You’re Sick.”)

Even With Quick Cheap Malaria Lab Tests, Dog Noses Can Still “Be Very Useful”

(p. D4) A small pilot study has shown that dogs can accurately identify socks worn overnight by children infected with malaria parasites — even when the children had cases so mild that they were not feverish.

The study, a collaboration between British and Gambian scientists and the British charity Medical Detection Dogs, was released last week at the annual convention of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

. . .

The new study, its authors said, does not mean that dogs will replace laboratories. Inexpensive rapid tests for malaria have been available for over a decade; more than 200 million people in dozens of countries are infected each year.

But for sorting through crowds, malaria-sniffing dogs could potentially be very useful.

Some countries and regions that have eliminated the disease share heavily trafficked borders with others that have not. For example, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the island of Zanzibar have no cases but get streams of visitors from Mozambique, India and mainland Tanzania.

And when a region is close to eliminating malaria, dogs could sweep through villages, nosing out silent carriers — people who are not ill but have parasites in their blood that mosquitoes could pass on to others.

. . .

If just one chemical indicated cancer or malaria, “we’d have discovered it by now,” said Claire Guest, who founded Medical Detection Dogs in 2008 and oversaw dog training in the study. “It’s more like a tune of many notes, and the dogs can pick it up.”

For the full commentary see:

Donald G. McNeil Jr. “Global Health; Sniffing Out Malaria in Its Tracks.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 6, 2018 [sic]): D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 5, 2018 [sic], and has the title “Global Health; Dogs Can Detect Malaria. How Useful Is That?”)

A later-published version of the initial “small pilot study” discussed above is:

Guest, Claire, Margaret Pinder, Mark Doggett, Chelci Squires, Muna Affara, Balla Kandeh, Sarah Dewhirst, Steven V. Morant, Umberto D’Alessandro, James G. Logan, and Steve W. Lindsay. “Trained Dogs Identify People with Malaria Parasites by Their Odour.” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 19, no. 6 (June 2019): 578-80.

Dual-Class Stock Allows Firm Founders to Retain Control

(p. B10) . . . Britain is changing the rules to attract more would-be corporate dictators. Its financial regulator this month [July 2024] is ditching shareholder protections in an effort to attract IPOs back to the venerable London Stock Exchange.

The hope is that owners of companies will like London more if they can maintain control, while management will like London more if they don’t forever have to ask pesky shareholders for permission for things.

. . .

Investors in the U.S. have been all too happy to buy companies where the founders have kept control, or act as if they did. Benign dictators are in fashion.

. . .

The history of corporate success fits this model perfectly. Founders who manage to create, expand and list a company are usually pretty good. It isn’t surprising that shareholders like to give successful founders a free rein, avoiding all the usual corporate-governance restraints designed to prevent flights of fancy by a runaway CEO.

Founders also have skin in the game, in the form of a large part of their fortunes tied up in the stock, unlike the hired help who fill the C-suite at most big companies. Their flights of fancy might not always work out—Alphabet’s “moonshot” ventures have mostly lost money—but are part of the point of investing with a founder promising growth.

. . .

In companies that give extra votes to the founder, it becomes hard or impossible to change the board, let alone kick out the CEO.

. . .

London’s outright ban on dual-class stock has been tested by market forces and failed because companies simply listed elsewhere, usually on the Nasdaq. Britain will now have a corporate-governance regime that puts more onus on shareholders to protect themselves.

For the full commentary see:

James Mackintosh. “Streetwise; There Is a Time for Corporate Despots.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 20, 2024): B10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed month, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated July 19, 2024, and has the title “Streetwise; There Is a Time for Corporate Despots—but It Isn’t Forever.”)

“Fiennes Is Superb” as “Calmly Eccentric Self-Taught Scholar”

(p. A13) Every now and then a film comes along—not a great one, necessarily—that makes you deeply glad. It’s how I feel about “The Dig.”

. . .

The dig in question has come to be called Sutton Hoo, after its site on the banks of a tidal river in Suffolk. The film, directed by Simon Stone and adapted by Moira Buffini from a John Preston novel about the discovery, plunges us into the adventure by following an unassuming gent named Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) as he bicycles his way to the fairly imposing house of Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), a widow eager to investigate a mysterious group of mounds on her property. The project calls for an archaeologist—not Indiana Jones, necessarily, but someone with more extensive training than Basil, who was, in real life, the man who made the discovery, and who describes himself here with with laconic pride as a lifelong excavator. Yet the nation is preparing for war, no archaeologists are available and Basil will have to do.

Thus does “The Dig” deftly address issues of class—Basil knows more about the history and texture of Suffolk’s soil than any credentialed expert a museum might have sent—while giving us a prime example of an archetype dear to English films, the calmly eccentric self-taught scholar (who of course smokes a pipe). Mr. Fiennes is superb in the role—you’ll be glad to watch him digging away with his shovel, and you’ll be thrilled, as I was, when, after digging for a good while, he shows up at Edith’s door and says, his voice quivering with emotion, “I think you’d better come and see.” (The emotional spectrum of the cinematography, by Mike Eley, ranges from solemn to ecstatic.)

For the full review see:

Joe Morgenstern. “Unearthing a Glittering Tale.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Jan. 29, 2021 [sic]): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 28, 2021 [sic], and has the title “‘The Dig’: Unearthing a Glittering Tale.”)

Prepare for Next Unexpected Disaster By Unbinding Nimble Entrepreneurs Who Can Pivot and Improvise

Governments have trouble preparing for uncertain and rare disasters, such as pandemics. So they “fight the last war,” expecting that the next disaster will look like the last disaster. Before WWII, France built the Maginot line, which they thought would have protected them against the kind of attack they had faced in WWI. The U.S. was more prepared for an Ebola pandemic than for a Covid pandemic. In an uncertain world, the best way to prepare for rare disasters is to allow and encourage nimble entrepreneurs who can resiliently pivot and improvise to counter whatever disaster arrives.

(p. A8) Britain’s government “failed” the country’s citizens in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a damning report from an official public inquiry said on Thursday [July 18, 2024], partly because officials had prepared for “the wrong pandemic.”

The arrival of Covid-19 in 2020 exposed flaws in Britain’s public health system and its pandemic preparedness that had been ignored for years, the report said. During the early waves of infections, Britain’s per capita death rate was among the highest in Europe, eventually leading to more than 225,000 deaths in total, according to official data.

“Had the U.K. been better prepared for and more resilient to the pandemic, some of that financial and human cost may have been avoided,” the report said.

. . .

Britain had a plan, but it was “outdated and lacked adaptability,” the report said.

It was also too focused on the possibility of a flu pandemic. “Although it was understandable for the U.K. to prioritize pandemic influenza, this should not have been to the effective exclusion of other potential pathogen outbreaks,” the report said.

. . .

Ministers, who are political appointees, did not have access to a broad enough range of scientific research and opinions that would have informed their policies, and advisers did not feel confident about expressing dissenting views.

“The advice offered to ministers and international bodies may well have been affected by a degree of ‘groupthink’,” the report said.

For the full story see:

Lynsey Chutel. “Before Covid, U.K. Prepared for ‘the Wrong Pandemic,’ Inquiry Finds.” The New York Times (Monday, July 22, 2024): A8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 18, 2024, and has the title “U.K. Failed in Handling of Covid Pandemic, Inquiry Finds.”)

The “damning report” mentioned above, is:

Hallett, Baroness. “Uk Covid-19 Inquiry; Module 1: The Resilience and Preparedness of the United Kingdom.” July 18, 2024.

Akunin Bravely Says Russians “Obediently Follow” the “Paranoia” of a “Deranged Dictator”

(p. A4) Hundreds of Russians packed an auditorium in central London on a recent warm evening to listen as Boris Akunin, the author of a wildly popular detective series, told them that when it came to the Ukraine war, “I believe that the actions of the Russian Army are criminal.”

Mr. Akunin’s series, set in late czarist times, made him rich and famous, but outspoken statements like that one have made him more infamous of late back home in Russia. The Kremlin recently labeled the author — who went into self-imposed exile in London a decade ago — a “terrorist” and effectively banned his works.

When President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Akunin wrote on Facebook, “Russia is ruled by a psychologically deranged dictator and worst of all, it obediently follows his paranoia.” At that time, he began contemplating how cultural figures fleeing abroad might still reach their domestic audience and perhaps help to spur change at home. Being cut off from his own readers lent the project special urgency.

“I have to say, the amount of work and writing I’ve been doing over these two terrible years, never in my life have I written so much,” he told the audience members, who laughed when he said that a writing binge trumped a drinking binge. “It is a form of escapism.”

. . .

Born Grigory Chkhartishvili in Georgia, he grew up in Moscow, where his mother’s family were ardent Communists. As a boy, he once complained to his grandmother that he disliked porridge, and she told him: “You don’t have to like porridge, you have to eat it. You have to like Lenin and the Communist Party.”

. . .

Mr. Akunin’s lecture, on May 9 [2024], coincided with the release of the latest volume, “The Destruction and Resurrection of the Empire,” about the Lenin and Stalin years. His basic thesis is that Russia has considered centralized empire-building to be something sacred since the 15th century. The Ukraine war is Mr. Putin’s striving to do it again, he said.

. . .

In May [2024], he introduced an online platform where writers, filmmakers, theater directors, musicians and other artists could stream their work, charging viewers a small fee. He also expanded the website for selling his books to include many other authors banned in Russia. After he refused to stop selling “Heritage,” a new novel by the best-selling author Vladimir Sorokin, also living in exile, the site was blocked in Russia in late June.

For the full story see:

Neil MacFarquhar. “Exiled in London, but Still Focused on His Russian Audience.” The New York Times (Monday, July 15, 2024): A4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed years, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 14, 2024, and has the title “From Exile in London, a Crime Novelist Works to Transform Russia.”)

The Cholera and Bubonic Plague Vaccination Campaigns of Waldemar Haffkine Count as Evidence of “the Benevolence of British Medical Imperialism”

(p. C7) “In the end, all history is natural history,” writes Simon Schama in “Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations.” The author, a wide-ranging historian and an engaging television host, reconciles the weight of medical detail with the light-footed pleasures of narrative discovery. His book profiles some of the unsung miracle workers of modern vaccination, and offers a subtle rumination on borders political and biological.

. . .

Inoculation, Mr. Schama writes, became a “serious big business” in commercial England, despite the inoculators’ inability to understand how (p. C8) it worked, and despite Tory suspicions that the procedure meant “new-fangled,” possibly Jewish, interference in the divine plan. In 1764, the Italian medical professor Angelo Gatti published an impassioned defense of inoculation that demolished humoral theory. Mr. Schama calls Gatti an “unsung visionary of the Enlightenment.” His work was a boon to public health, though his findings met resistance in France, where the prerevolutionary medical establishment was more concerned with protecting its authority.

. . .

(p. C8) Mr. Schama alights on the story of Waldemar Haffkine, the Odessa-born Jew who created vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. In 1892, Haffkine inoculated himself against cholera with the vaccine he had developed at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. He went on to inoculate thousands of Indians, and so effectively that his campaigns served as, in Mr. Schama’s words, “an advertisement for the benevolence of British medical imperialism.”

. . .

The author notes the contrast between the facts of Haffkine’s achievements and the response of the British establishment, with its modern echoes of the medieval fantasy that Jews were “demonic instigators of mass death.” Yet Mr. Schama’s skepticism of authority only extends so far. It would have been instructive to learn why, when Covid-19 appeared, the WHO concurred with Voltaire that the Chinese were “the wisest and best governed people in the world” and advised liberal democracies to emulate China’s lockdowns.

Haffkine’s colleague Ernest Hanbury Hankin once wrote an essay called “The Mental Limitations of the Expert.” Mr. Schama’s conclusion shows the limitations of our expert class, which appears not to understand the breach of public trust caused by the politicization of Covid policy and the suppression of public debate. You do not have to be “far right” to distrust mandatory mRNA vaccination. As Mr. Schama shows, the health of the body politic depends on scientific inquiry.

For the full review, see:

Dominic Green. “Protecting the Body Politic.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 23, 2023): C7-C8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 22, 2023, and has the title “‘Foreign Bodies’ Review: Migrant Microbes, Human Borders.”)

The book under review is:

Schama, Simon. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations. New York: Ecco Press, 2023.

Prime Minister Robert Peel Lost His Job for Supporting Repeal of the Corn Laws, but Advanced Britain’s Middle-Class

(p. C11) Simon Heffer’s “High Minds” is a deep, droll and lucid exploration of Britain’s intellectual and political life from 1837, when the young Queen Victoria ascended the throne of a chaotic, semifeudal society, to 1880, by which time Victoria was a widow and the Empress of India, and the British, apart from those at the very top and bottom of society, had bootstrapped themselves into sobriety and “respectability.”

. . .

The “crucial step” in the middle-class advance, Mr. Heffer writes, was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Opening the ports to foreign grain pacified the workers by lowering the price of bread. It hobbled the aristocracy by cutting the value of land, their biggest asset. And it geared economic policy to the commercial classes. A “long-term realignment” in politics followed. Repeal was secured by a Tory prime minister, Robert Peel, in alliance with free-market Whigs. It cost Peel his job but, over the next two decades, the Whigs turned into the Liberals, the party of middle-class reform.

For the full review, see:

Dominic Green. “Laying Stone on Stone.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 23, 2022 [sic]): C10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 22, 2022 [sic], and has the title “‘High Minds’ Review: The Victorian Pursuit of Perfection.”)

The book under review is:

Heffer, Simon. High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. New York: Pegasus Books, 2022.

Fauci’s Office Rejected Protocol for a Voluntary COVID Human Challenge Trial That Could Have Tested Therapies and Vaccines Faster

(p. 2) . . . the first Covid-19 human challenge study [was] just completed in Britain, where young, healthy and unvaccinated volunteers were infected with the coronavirus that causes Covid while researchers carefully monitored how their bodies responded.

. . ., there were those who decried deliberately infecting or “challenging” healthy volunteers with disease-causing pathogens. It violates the medical principle of “do no harm.” The trade-off is a unique opportunity to discover the causes, transmission and progression of an illness, as well as the ability to more rapidly test the effectiveness of proposed treatments.

. . .

Dr. [Matthew] Memoli [the director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases Clinical Studies Unit at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] has conducted numerous influenza challenge studies, and he prepared a protocol for a Covid challenge trial that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases rejected last year because it was felt that not enough was known about the virus and that there were no effective rescue therapies, according to a statement from the office of the director, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The consortium formed to run Britain’s Covid challenge trial, which included scientists who trained at the Common Cold Unit, had access to the British National Health Service’s robust, real-time data on Covid hospitalizations and deaths. The researchers designing the study said they felt confident that there was little risk to the healthy unvaccinated 18-to-30-year-old volunteers they recruited for the trial. There were no severe adverse events in the 36 people who participated, and they will continue to be monitored over the next year.

The aim of the study was to identify the lowest amount of virus to safely and reliably infect someone, so researchers can later easily test the efficacy of vaccines or antivirals on future challenge trial volunteers.

. . .

Dr. Fauci’s office said the institute has no plans to fund Covid-19 human challenge trials in the future. Many bioethicists support that decision. “We don’t ask people to sacrifice themselves for the good of society,” said Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. “In the U.S., we are very much about protecting individual rights and individual life and health and liberty, while in more communal societies it’s about the greater good.”

But Josh Morrison, a co-founder of 1Day Sooner, which advocates on behalf of more than 40,000 would-be human challenge volunteers, argues it should be his and other people’s right to take risks for the greater good. “Most people aren’t going to want to be in a Covid challenge study, and that’s totally fine, but they shouldn’t project their own choices on other people,” he said.

. . .

As one participant in Britain’s Covid human challenge trial put it: “You know the phrase ‘one interesting fact about yourself’ that strikes terror into everyone? That’s now solved forever. I did something that made a difference.”

For the full commentary, see:

Kate Murphy. “Are Human Challenge Trials Ethical?” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, October 17, 2021 [sic]): 2.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed words, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 14, 2021 [sic], and has the title “Britain Infected Volunteers With the Coronavirus. Why Won’t the U.S.?”)

Citizen Archeologists “Are Increasingly Making Important Discoveries”

(p. 11) The long, thin piece of metal looked like a scaffolding pole when Trevor Penny saw it on the banks of an English river last November [2023].

. . .

But his find that day was much more dramatic: a rusty Viking sword that had been there for more than 1,000 years.

. . .

When Mr. Penny, 52, realized what he had found, he contacted a local official responsible for identifying the public’s archaeological finds.

The discovery was “one further puzzle piece that can cast light on our shared heritage,” said that official, Edward Caswell, who documents Oxfordshire finds for the Portable Antiquities Scheme run by the British Museum.  . . .

“We do find Viking weapons, including swords, deposited in rivers in England,” said Jane Kershaw, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Oxford.

Many such weapons have been found in the north and east of the country, Dr. Kershaw said. She called the sword a “rare example” of viking activity in the area.

“It is outside the normal find zone for these weapons,” she said. “But the Vikings, they were active in that area. There is a lot that we don’t know about their activities.”

Hobbyists are increasingly making important discoveries, and Dr. Kershaw said it was critical that they report their finds. “It’s hugely valuable information,” she said. “As long as they are recording it, this is having archaeology that otherwise would be lost.”

For the full story, see:

Isabella Kwai. “Treasure Hunter Finds Viking Sword.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, March 17, 2024): 11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 15, 2024, and has the title “This Treasure Hunter’s Latest Find? A 1,000-Year-Old Viking Sword.”)

Palestinian Group Defaces Portrait of Balfour, Who Tried to Save Jewish Lives

Pro-Palestinian slashes portrait of Arthur James Balfour at University of Cambridge. Source: NYT article quoted and cited below.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 advocated the establishment of a Jewish homeland (Dershowitz 2003, p. 35). “In 1937, 1947, and 2000-2001,” Jewish leaders accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state, but Palestinian leaders “each time . . . rejected the offer and responded with increased terrorism” (Dershowitz 2003, p. 159). If Israel had existed by the 1930s, “hundreds of thousands—perhaps even a million or more” European Jews could have immigrated to it before the Holocaust, saving their lives (Dershowitz 2003, p. 52). Arthur James Balfour’s portrait should be honored, not “slashed and spray-painted” (article quoted below).

(p. A6) A pro-Palestinian group slashed and spray-painted a century-old portrait of Arthur James Balfour at the University of Cambridge on Friday [March 8, 2024], defacing a painting of the British official whose pledge of support in 1917 for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” helped pave the way to Israel’s founding three decades later.

For the full story, see:

Marc Tracy. “Balfour Portrait at University of Cambridge Is Defaced.” The New York Times (Saturday, March 9, 2024): A6.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 8, 2024, and has the title “Activists Deface Portrait of Balfour, Who Supported Jewish Homeland.”)

Dershowitz’s heavily referenced book, cited above, is:

Dershowitz, Alan. The Case for Israel. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003.