Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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Oct. 11
The Washington Post on AI’s impact on chemistry, biomedicine
One of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in physics, Geoffrey Hinton, who pioneered work on the neural networks that undergird artificial intelligence, has warned that machines might someday get smarter than humans. Perhaps. But this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry honored a real-world example of how AI is helping humans today with astounding discoveries in protein structure that have far-reaching applications. This is a development worth savoring.
Proteins are biology’s lead actors. As the Nobel committee pointed out, proteins “control and drive all the chemical reactions that together are the basis of life. Proteins also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies and the building blocks of different tissues.” In the human body, they are necessary for the structure, function and regulation of tissues and organs. All proteins begin with a chain of up to 20 kinds of amino acids, strung together in a sequence encoded in DNA. Each chain folds into a unique structure, and those shapes determine how proteins interact with other molecules.
Looking like a tangled ball of twine, proteins have a complex and precise design of moving parts that are linked to chemical events and bind to other molecules. Antibodies are proteins produced by the immune system that bind to foreign molecules, including those on the surface of an invading virus, such as the spikes on the coronavirus that causes covid-19.
At the end of the 1950s, University of Cambridge researchers John Kendrew and Max Perutz successfully used a method called X-ray crystallography to produce the first 3D models of proteins. In recognition, they were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in chemistry. In the ensuing half-century, the quest to document protein structures remained laborious and slow. A single protein structure might take a doctoral student four or five years to figure out. Before AI, the field’s central repository contained some 185,000 experimentally solved protein structures.
This year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry went to three scientists who revolutionized the field. David Baker of the University of Washington built entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of DeepMind, a Britain-based firm that is part of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, developed an AI and machine learning model that can predict the structure of proteins, decoding the amino acids that make up each. The model, AlphaFold, can do in minutes what once took years.
AlphaFold takes advantage of neural networks that can locate patterns in enormous amounts of data. The system was trained on the vast information in the databases of all known protein structures and amino acid sequences. AlphaFold has predicted more than 200 million protein structures, or nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, including those in humans, plants, bacteria, animals and other organisms. The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database makes this data freely available.
To design new drugs and vaccines, scientists need to know how a protein looks or behaves. The AlphaFold result is a prediction — a visual representation of a protein’s expected structure — but such predictions can accelerate biomedical research.
The AlphaFold blog recounts the story of scientists searching for a better vaccine against malaria, a disease that afflicts 250 million people a year and causes more than 600,000 deaths. Because malaria is caused by a shape-shifting parasite, vaccine researchers had long struggled to characterize the structure of one surface protein they needed to target to interrupt the infection. Then AlphaFold’s prediction of the right structure snapped it into focus. Matthew Higgins at the University of Oxford said the breakthrough helped his team decide which bits of the protein to put in the vaccine, which trains the body’s immune system to detect it and act. This helped advance his research from “a fundamental science stage to the preclinical and clinical development stage.”
Anyone who has used ChatGPT knows that AI is not always correct — and the malaria scientists found that some of the 3D visualizations of proteins were inexact. But AI will only get better over time. Already, the AlphaFold effort is expanding to create accurate visualizations of how proteins interact with other biomedical structures, such as nucleic acids.
In the years ahead, AI dangers must be confronted and safeguards considered. Without a doubt, there are risks when powerful technology falls into the hands of malign actors.
But, for now, AlphaFold shows that AI can supercharge existing knowledge to benefit mankind. The Nobel committee noted that, thanks to these advances, “researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.” And there will be more to come.
ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/11/nobel-prize-chemistry-proteins-ai-biomedicine/
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Oct. 14
The New York Times on the PRESS Act and the First Amendment
Governments often chafe at the presence of a free press. The reason is simple: A robust and independent news media keeps a sharp eye on government and, when necessary, exposes abuse of power, corruption, incompetence and waste.
Exposing such things depends, of course, not just on journalists but also on brave officials willing to sound the alarm about government misconduct. Even when their disclosures are clearly in the public interest, these whistle-blowers — or sources, in the journalistic parlance — often hide their identities to avoid punishment or retaliation. In this way, bringing essential information to the public often depends on protecting the identity of the person sharing it.
Safeguarding the anonymity of reporters’ sources is essential in the exercise of this critical role, a need that several federal courts have found is implicit in the First Amendment. It has been recognized by governments or courts in 49 states and the District of Columbia as a form of protection for journalists and news outlets against unfair or overbearing efforts by government to ferret out their sources, punish whistle-blowers and scare off others who might consider speaking up about wrongdoing.
There is nothing of the sort, however, on the federal level, where the need is arguably greatest, in part because of the rapid evolution of electronic snooping and the fallout of sharply polarized politics. Having a federal law on the books would provide a higher level of protection than the recognition now provided by most federal circuit courts.
That could change before the year is out if the Senate Judiciary Committee releases a strong bipartisan bill that has already sailed unopposed twice, in this session and the last, through the House of Representatives. Called the Protect Reporters From Exploitative State Spying Act, or PRESS Act, it would shield reporters from court-ordered disclosure of their sources of information, except in the rare cases in which disclosure is necessary to prevent an act of terrorism or imminent violence.
The New York Times is clearly not a disinterested bystander on this issue. It is this board’s conviction, shared by most independent news media, that governmental restrictions on freedoms of the press are a certain route to abuse of power and authoritarianism. The Times and its reporters have been involved in numerous legal battles to ensure that the press remains free and independent.
But this is not purely a matter of press versus government. This law would effectively protect those who serve the public interest by blowing the whistle on government wrongdoing. And it would help protect all Americans, who deserve nothing less than the full truth about the officials they elect and the government they fund.
The nation’s founders saw freedom of expression as a critical component of democracy. George Washington’s formulation is almost biblical: “The freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”
Today, every member of the House, some themselves targets of sharp investigative reporting or frequent critics of the news media, has supported swift passage of the PRESS bill. There are three Republican sponsors of the bill in the Senate, but it is opposed by a small clutch of conservative senators — most notably Tom Cotton, a hard-right Republican from Arkansas — attempting to keep the legislation bottled up in the Judiciary Committee.
Mr. Cotton’s argument is that the PRESS Act would open a floodgate to leaks that would undermine law enforcement and national security. That argument, however, is based not on evidence but on a visceral hostility to the news media, which he has made clear he views largely as an ideological foe. Too many reporters, he said in a statement, are “little more than left-wing activists who are, at best, ambivalent about America and who are cavalier about our security and the truth.”
Leaks and whistle-blowers have often proved essential to the public’s understanding of major events and the workings of government at all levels. There is nothing ideological about their usefulness; they can be just as effective in exposing the unwelcome truth about Democratic administrations as Republican ones. By protecting reporters from having to reveal their sources, the bill would ideally encourage more whistle-blowers to help shine a light on government abuses.
Administrations of both parties — and especially those of Barack Obama and Donald Trump — have tried varying means to block leaks that would be in the public interest and to pressure reporters into revealing their sources. Attorney General Merrick Garland ended these abuses for the duration of President Biden’s administration, announcing that the Justice Department would no longer dig through the phone records of reporters to identify sources for leak investigations. Without a law in place, though, a future administration could easily reinstate that practice.
Nothing in the PRESS Act would prevent the government from prosecuting leakers, and the government has vast powers to monitor its officials without demanding that reporters divulge the information they seek.
There is no evidence that states with press shield laws have been hamstrung in combating crime, and the federal government has identified and prosecuted major leakers without information coerced from reporters. The Obama administration spent years trying to force the reporter James Risen, formerly of The Times, to identify his source for a book in which he detailed a failed C.I.A. plan to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. Though required by a subpoena to testify, Mr. Risen steadfastly refused to identify his source and was not compelled to do so. The leaker was arrested and imprisoned anyway.
The PRESS Act would not protect journalists who violate laws to acquire information, and the exceptions for national security are broad. But hostility toward the news media in the polarized politics of the day makes it more urgent than ever to ensure that reporters can continue to pursue their essential role as watchdogs over the government without the threat of court-ordered demands for their sources and information. The PRESS Act is needed now.
ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/opinion/editorials/press-act-reporters-leaks-whistleblower.html
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Oct. 13
The Wall Street Journal on transgender sports, a sleeper issue in 2024
Every election has issues that are predictable—abortion and the economy this year—but also some that surprise the political class. This year one sleeper issue is progressive transgender coercion, which is playing against Democrats in races across the country.
Consider the ad running in Ohio against Sen. Sherrod Brown, in which a narrator says Mr. Brown is “too liberal for Ohio,” and he voted “to let transgender biological men participate in women’s sports.”
Some media fact-checkers are calling this claim false, but not without astounding sleight of hand. The ad, sponsored by a Republican-aligned Super PAC, cites Mr. Brown’s vote against a failed 2021 amendment offered by Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville. “When we pull up this vote on the U.S. Senate website,” says a report by WKYC in Cleveland, “we see it had nothing to do with allowing transgender people to participate in women’s sports. It was actually only about money.”
Only money? “Specifically,” WKYC explains, “Brown voted against including an amendment in the American Rescue Plan Act that would have stripped federal funding from Ohio schools if those schools allowed transgender people to participate in women’s sports.” Ergo, the ad’s claim is “false,” and Mr. Brown “did not vote ‘to let transgender biological men participate in women’s sports.’”
PolitiFact has a similar sloppy take, saying that such arguments about Mr. Brown are false because the 2021 amendment, as well as a similar one this year, “did not dictate athletic eligibility.” Well, not directly, but adding strings to federal funding is a common way for both parties in Congress to drive policy, and it’s hard to imagine any public school telling Uncle Sam to take his money and scram.
The LGBT activist group GLAAD confirms our point when it says Mr. Brown has “consistently opposed attempts to ban transgender athletes from participating in sports aligned with their gender identity.” It means this as a compliment.
The issue is popping up in other campaigns. An ad in Wisconsin says Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin “voted to let biological men into women’s sports.” Republican challenger Eric Hovde gets spontaneous applause when he raises the issue at campaign events. In Montana, an ads says Sen. Jon Tester “voted to let men compete against our girls,” and “those aren’t Montana values.” The proliferation of these arguments against so many Democratic incumbents suggests it’s resonating with the public.
A pluralistic society depends on an attitude of live and let live, and American adults are and should be free to make their own choices about gender. But what many people resent is having progressive cultural values imposed on them. That includes compelling their daughters to compete against athletes who were born male.
Last year 69% of Americans told Gallup that “transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender.”
This isn’t bigotry. For most Americans it’s a matter of fairness, as well as the equal opportunity for women in sports enshrined in Title IX. Not long ago most Democrats believed in that principle. But these days the hard edge of the transgender movement has dictated that its view of gender must be imposed nationwide. Senate Democrats have toed that line.
This includes whether minors should have access to medical gender transitions. That Super PAC ad about Sen. Brown says he supports “allowing puberty blockers and sex-change surgeries for minor children.” The source is an interview in which Mr. Brown said: “A child’s healthcare decisions are between them, their parents, their families, their doctors, not politicians.”
Mr. Brown’s campaign told WKYC that his remarks “were not in support of puberty blockers or gender reassignment surgeries,” but merely a call to keep politicians out of it. That sure sounds like a position of “allowing” minors to access such treatments. Somehow, though, WKYC also rated this claim as “false.” Who fact checks the fact-checkers?
This media conformity is one reason the transgender sports issue is catching Democrats by surprise. The press portrays any dissent on the issue as out of political bounds and gives it no coverage or dismisses as benighted bias what millions of Americans view as common sense. This means voters may hear about it only when a politician makes it a campaign issue, and it might cost Democrats control of Congress this year.
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Oct. 15
The Los Angeles Times on capital punishment in the United States
The execution of Robert Roberson in Texas remains on track for Thursday, despite serious doubts that he killed or even mistreated his 2-year-old daughter in 2002.
Prosecutors and medical experts insisted at trial that the child’s head trauma was evidence that Roberson had physically abused her. But now the detective who testified against him says he believes Roberson is innocent, and a string of physicians argue that the “ shaken baby syndrome” diagnosis that was standard medical doctrine at the time, and a key to Roberson’s conviction, is junk science and unreliable evidence of abuse.
The theory is in such disrepute that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Oct. 9 overturned the conviction of another man, Andrew Roark, 25 years after he was found to have injured his girlfriend’s child by severe shaking. It’s unlikely a jury today would buy the shaken baby argument in Roark’s case, the court said.
But Texas still plans to put Roberson to death this week.
There can be no greater perversion of justice than executing a person when there is serious doubt that he or she committed a crime. Laws, courts, prosecutors, witnesses and juries are all part of a system painstakingly crafted over centuries to ferret out the truth to deliver justice. But as in Roberson’s case, the justice system sometimes seems more concerned with sustaining belief in its own infallibility.
The case is not a one-off. The same day the Texas court threw out Roark’s conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Richard Glossip, who is on death row in Oklahoma despite serious doubts about his guilt. Everyone agrees that another man, Justin Sneed, murdered Barry Van Treese in 1997 and agreed to testify against Glossip to avoid the death penalty. The justices must consider whether prosecutors tainted the conviction by failing to disclose that Sneed was being treated for a serious psychiatric condition and lied about it.
During the arguments, Justice Clarence Thomas repeatedly expressed concern that the attempt to potentially reveal Glossip’s innocence and spare his life was undermining justice — because exposing misconduct or error could impugn the integrity of the prosecutors.
If a thousand years from now future scientists were to examine American civilization of the early 21st century, as anthropologists today study the Aztec empire and other societies that ritually killed, they might reasonably theorize that executions were part of the liturgy of democratic elections.
It would be a reasonable connection to make given that in the months before and after the 2020 presidential election, the federal government put 13 people to death from summer through the election and after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol (which included a makeshift gallows perhaps designated for the vice president) until just before the inauguration.
And the anthropologists would see another spate of executions, this one from Republican states, in the weeks before the 2024 election (although in fact executions proceed in some states at a steady pace).
In addition to Roberson in Texas, Derrick Dearman is scheduled to die Thursday in Alabama, although his execution has drawn less attention because there is no serious evidence of innocence. It’s merely another state killing.
And on Nov. 1, four days before the election, Richard Bernard Moore is scheduled to die in South Carolina (the same state ended its 13-year execution hiatus a month ago by killing Freddie Owens ). Moore has until Friday to decide whether to die by lethal injection, execution or firing squad.
It is extremely unlikely that the anthropologists will find evidence that the election season ritual killings protected us from whatever evil we feared. They may find instead that our stubborn embrace of junk science such as shaken baby syndrome to secure conviction and execution and the reluctance of courts to acknowledge error, poisoned our faith in our justice system and brought it down.
They may find a link between the cheapening of truth in criminal justice matters and a similar phenomenon in our elections, where the actual results are threatened by a candidate’s willingness to lie about them with a straight face.
It would be interesting to know how a future society will compare us with other nations that also deliver false justice in the form of capital punishment. For example, Japanese officials several weeks ago admitted misconduct in the case of Iwao Hakamada, now 88, convicted of a quadruple murder and sentenced to death in 1968.
Evidence against him was faked, authorities finally acknowledged, and he was acquitted last month. His life was stolen, his mental health destroyed. But at least his exoneration came while he was still alive.
Thank goodness, the anthropologists may say, that besides Japan and the United States, most other wealthy, law-observing, civilized nations of the time preserved liberty, public safety and confidence in institutions of justice without ever putting human beings, either guilty or innocent, to death.
ONLINE: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-10-15/editorial-serial-executions-robert-roberson
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Oct. 15
The Guardian on Israel and the undermining of the institution that is the United Nations
The United Nations is supposed to be above the fray – a forum for and facilitator of peaceful resolutions or, at the least, the minimisation of harms. Yet for the last year, Israel has treated it as an inconvenience at best and adversary at worst.
UN peacekeepers are literally in the path of its offensive in Lebanon and are refusing to leave as it has urged. The Israel Defense Forces forcibly entered a base and have repeatedly fired on their positions, injuring five. Nearly 230 aid workers for Unrwa, which supports Palestinians, have been killed in Gaza. Earlier this month, Israel declared the UN’s secretary‑general, António Guterres, persona non grata. In May, its outgoing ambassador to the UN shredded a copy of the charter.
The relationship has long been fraught. Israel says it is singled out unfairly by the large number of (non‑binding) general assembly resolutions criticising it. The country’s alliance with the US has meant that more consequential security council resolutions have almost always been vetoed by Washington.
Israel has long lobbied against Unrwa, objecting to its recognition of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and is now in the process of banning it as a terrorist organisation. The UN says that nine of its 13,000 employees in Gaza might have been involved in the 7 October Hamas attack: disturbing findings that do not negate the value of the agency, on which millions depend for basic supplies and services. The agency’s head, Philippe Lazzarini, says that the intent is ultimately to undermine the Palestinian aspiration for self-determination.
Only four years ago, when the World Jewish Congress honoured Mr Guterres, it described him as “the voice of fairness and equity that the state of Israel and the Jewish people have been hoping for at the United Nations for a long, long time”. His remark that the Hamas atrocities of 7 October “did not happen in a vacuum”, made as he condemned them, provoked anger in Israel. But the government also knew that its all-out assault on Gaza would inevitably bring intense criticism at the UN. Its attacks upon the institution, and the man who represents it, have sought to undercut and delegitimise the censure.
They are also a sign of the times. The UN is now a beleaguered institution, stuck on the sidelines of recent major conflicts. The security council has repeatedly been deadlocked, with the US, the UK and France on one side and Russia and China on the other. Western leaders have wrung their hands about this weakness and paralysis contributing to the decline of the rules-based international order. They must confront any attempt to further undermine it.
The UN security council has rightly issued a collective statement backing Mr Guterres. Unrwa too must be supported. The widespread condemnation of attacks on UN peacekeepers is also vital. Israel’s attacks are increasing its international isolation, even alienating Italy, one of its staunchest European allies, which is among those supplying the UN troops. Spain and Ireland have urged other EU members to suspend the free trade agreement with Israel over its actions in Gaza and Lebanon. Spain and France have called for countries to stop supplying arms to Israel.
But overall the US has been mealy-mouthed to date – and Israel in any case knows it will be financially and militarily supported whatever it does, as a former French ambassador to Washington and representative to the UN, Gérard Araud, has noted. The US is likely to regret allowing further weakening of the UN. Benjamin Netanyahu and his colleagues’ refusal to respect it makes it all the more important that others do so, and do so vocally.
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