Monday, October 21, 2013

The Secret Behind Iraq’s Scientific Resurgence

0Ten years ago, the Iraqi scientific establishment was in trouble. Political and military convulsions following the American invasion made it difficult to maintain routinized studies critical for robust research. Iraqi scientists were unable to engage with their peers, and the annual national output of peer-reviewed publications dipped into the double digits. Mesopotamia, a region so integral to the rise of human culture, was essentially sidelined from modern science.

Today, there is a sense of renewed progress. Systematic structural challenges remain, to be sure (unplanned power outages can interrupt code or ruin biological samples, for example), but the momentum is tangible – publications have more than tripled in the intervening decade, with no sign of letting up.

Several stabilizing factors have converged to account for this progress, not least of which is the decline in violent conflict and the semblance of political continuity. But another key factor – one that is easy to overlook – is the availability of scientific literature to local practitioners. Thanks to the Iraq Virtual Science Library (IVSL), academic research – those peer-reviewed reports generally encaged by steep paywalls – is now widely accessible.

The growing movement toward open access in the United States and other developed countries is predicated largely on issues of fairness, taxpayer return, and the productive synergies of shared information. But initiatives like the IVSL reveal another role for open access – as a tool for economic and technical development.

Access to information isn’t a silver bullet, but it is a foundational pre-requisite for scientists to join the global community of researchers and tap into a common marketplace of ideas that can be tailored to fit local needs.

The IVSL was developed in 2006 through an intricate collaboration between the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of State, and the National Academies of Science; the science diplomacy organization CRDF Global managed the effort, handling logistical and technical hurdles.

CRDF Global got its start in the 1990s, working to transition scientists and engineers who developed the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal toward less threatening activities. With more than 100,000 weapons experts suddenly out of work after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. government – through organizations like CRDF Global – sought ways to redirect the human capital into entrepreneurial initiatives or collaborations with American scientists.

Since then, CRDF Global has expanded its remit, and today, the organization works with countries across a wide range of technical heritage and diplomatic accessibility. The IVSL represents a particularly promising project from this new phase of engagement: Iraqi scientists may not have been quite as technically imposing as those from the former Soviet Union, but their isolation from the global scientific community was similarly stunting. “In places that emerged from the Soviet system,” recalls CRDF Global President and CEO Cathy Campbell, “there was an attitude that, they had great scientific journals and if they just published there, that was enough. Working with those countries to expand their access to the global literature really opens their eyes and stresses the fact that it’s not enough to just publish in your national journal.”

Another carryover from the organization’s original mission is the aim of preventing brain drain. In the mid-‘90s, Campbell says, “we wanted to make sure that the talented scientists and engineers remained in their countries and weren’t temped to sell their knowledge and expertise to the highest bidder. Today, in places like Iraq, we know that science and engineering are very important for economic growth, and we want to create the conditions that keep that knowledge there.”

It’s difficult to quantitatively assess that non-action – the decision of a talented scientist to not leave – but Campbell believes other metrics point to a successful program. More than 80,000 students and faculty have access to top journals, and downloads have reached 65,000 articles per month.

Perhaps most importantly, the program was fully transferred to Iraqi management in 2010, paving the way for the country’s scientists to recapture their rightful role in global science.

Method of recording brain activity could lead to mind-reading devices, Stanford scientists say

Using a novel method, the researchers collected the first solid evidence that the pattern of brain activity seen in someone performing a mathematical exercise under experimentally controlled conditions is very similar to that observed when the person engages in quantitative thought in the course of daily life.

“We’re now able to eavesdrop on the brain in real life,” said Josef Parvizi, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences and director of Stanford’s Human Intracranial Cognitive Electrophysiology Program. Parvizi is the senior author of the study, to be published Oct. 15 in Nature Communications. The study’s lead authors are postdoctoral scholar Mohammad Dastjerdi, MD, PhD, and graduate student Muge Ozker.

The finding could lead to “mind-reading” applications that, for example, would allow a patient who is rendered mute by a stroke to communicate via passive thinking. Conceivably, it could also lead to more dystopian outcomes: chip implants that spy on or even control people’s thoughts.

“This is exciting, and a little scary,” said Henry Greely, JD, the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and steering committee chair of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, who played no role in the study but is familiar with its contents and described himself as “very impressed” by the findings. “It demonstrates, first, that we can see when someone’s dealing with numbers and, second, that we may conceivably someday be able to manipulate the brain to affect how someone deals with numbers.”

The researchers monitored electrical activity in a region of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus, known to be important in attention and eye and hand motion. Previous studies have hinted that some nerve-cell clusters in this area are also involved in numerosity, the mathematical equivalent of literacy.

However, the techniques that previous studies have used, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, are limited in their ability to study brain activity in real-life settings and to pinpoint the precise timing of nerve cells’ firing patterns. These studies have focused on testing just one specific function in one specific brain region, and have tried to eliminate or otherwise account for every possible confounding factor. In addition, the experimental subjects would have to lie more or less motionless inside a dark, tubular chamber whose silence would be punctuated by constant, loud, mechanical, banging noises while images flashed on a computer screen.

“This is not real life,” said Parvizi. “You’re not in your room, having a cup of tea and experiencing life’s events spontaneously.” A profoundly important question, he said, is: “How does a population of nerve cells that has been shown experimentally to be important in a particular function work in real life?”

His team’s method, called intracranial recording, provided exquisite anatomical and temporal precision and allowed the scientists to monitor brain activity when people were immersed in real-life situations. Parvizi and his associates tapped into the brains of three volunteers who were being evaluated for possible surgical treatment of their recurring, drug-resistant epileptic seizures.

The procedure involves temporarily removing a portion of a patient’s skull and positioning packets of electrodes against the exposed brain surface. For up to a week, patients remain hooked up to the monitoring apparatus while the electrodes pick up electrical activity within the brain. This monitoring continues uninterrupted for patients’ entire hospital stay, capturing their inevitable repeated seizures and enabling neurologists to determine the exact spot in each patient’s brain where the seizures are originating.

During this whole time, patients remain tethered to the monitoring apparatus and mostly confined to their beds. But otherwise, except for the typical intrusions of a hospital setting, they are comfortable, free of pain and free to eat, drink, think, talk to friends and family in person or on the phone, or watch videos.

The electrodes implanted in patients’ heads are like wiretaps, each eavesdropping on a population of several hundred thousand nerve cells and reporting back to a computer.

In the study, participants’ actions were also monitored by video cameras throughout their stay. This allowed the researchers later to correlate patients’ voluntary activities in a real-life setting with nerve-cell behavior in the monitored brain region.

As part of the study, volunteers answered true/false questions that popped up on a laptop screen, one after another. Some questions required calculation — for instance, is it true or false that 2 + 4 = 5? — while others demanded what scientists call episodic memory — true or false: I had coffee at breakfast this morning. In other instances, patients were simply asked to stare at the crosshairs at the center of an otherwise blank screen to capture the brain’s so-called “resting state.”

Consistent with other studies, Parvizi’s team found that electrical activity in a particular group of nerve cells in the intraparietal sulcus spiked when, and only when, volunteers were performing calculations.

Afterward, Parvizi and his colleagues analyzed each volunteer’s daily electrode record, identified many spikes in intraparietal-sulcus activity that occurred outside experimental settings, and turned to the recorded video footage to see exactly what the volunteer had been doing when such spikes occurred.

They found that when a patient mentioned a number — or even a quantitative reference, such as “some more,” “many” or “bigger than the other one” — there was a spike of electrical activity in the same nerve-cell population of the intraparietal sulcus that was activated when the patient was doing calculations under experimental conditions.

That was an unexpected finding. “We found that this region is activated not only when reading numbers or thinking about them, but also when patients were referring more obliquely to quantities,” said Parvizi.

“These nerve cells are not firing chaotically,” he said. “They’re very specialized, active only when the subject starts thinking about numbers. When the subject is reminiscing, laughing or talking, they’re not activated.” Thus, it was possible to know, simply by consulting the electronic record of participants’ brain activity, whether they were engaged in quantitative thought during nonexperimental conditions.

Any fears of impending mind control are, at a minimum, premature, said Greely. “Practically speaking, it’s not the simplest thing in the world to go around implanting electrodes in people’s brains. It will not be done tomorrow, or easily, or surreptitiously.”

Parvizi agreed. “We’re still in early days with this,” he said. “If this is a baseball game, we’re not even in the first inning. We just got a ticket to enter the stadium.