Things Beyond the Nation State #1 Introduction

Identity, belonging and how this species organises itself in groups has been a recurrent theme on this blog since we started back in the pandemic days of 2020. We’ve surveyed the work of theorists like Amy Chua: pondered sports affiliation, tribe and nation, and the several ways of belonging to each. Considered experiments in psychology and behaviour. Even speculated if there might be a World Government waiting in the decades to come. Yet up to now nothing has superseded the Nation State as the only successful and enduring method of organising our multifarious hostile tribes into larger confederations. By which they obtain common benefits of defence and low mutual trading barriers, the two sine qua nones of all statecraft. (everything else is method)

The trouble with this comforting settlement is size. Each little kingdoms of Anglo Saxon England-Wessex, Mercia and the rest-was perfectly able to provide its residents needs for hundreds of years. Until a bunch of pesky Vikings came along and nearly drove them all to utter destruction. Only by forming a larger unit, England, were the Anglo Saxons able to survive and prevail: And England became their nation in turn. A lesson repeated across many lands and times. So powerful that it begs the question: are our current polities, even the largest, now too small too indebted, to mutually jealous, to cope with the existential questions now born into the world? We repeat: this is not a call to abolish nation states which can and should continue to exist, But it may be a call for a next tier or organisation to act on those problems, and only those problems, which only it has the competence to address.

We think those problems are Global Warming, Pollution, Migration, sudden Catastrophes like pandemics, economic Inequality and Security risks from things like AI and nuclear weapons All are pressing and all interconnected at some level or other. You may suggest more, gentle readers. But in the next few weeks we will do our best to list them into some sort of order and try to consider some of the problems they pose, for you to think about. For we know of few hard and fast answers. We hope you will join us on this journey and will welcome your comments, suggestions and ideas. Keep ‘em coming.

#global warming #nuclear war #pandemic #volcano #AI #pollution #economics #history

VIR 5500: Promising new treatment for Prostate Cancer

Immunotherapy, which involves training the body’s own defence systems such as T-cells to attack cancerous tissues, has been one of the medical success stories of the last twenty years. Yet some cancers still demonstrate a certain recalcitrance in the face of the new ministrations. Unfortunately, one of them is Prostate cancer, the most common form of cancer in men, killing up to 1.5 million of them annually. But not only does this report by Nicola Davis of the Guardian [1] offer hope of real progress, it has some deeper lessons for those of us in the evidence-based thought-modulated community(EBTM). Which means you, gentle reader.

All immunotherapy depends on T Cell engagers (TCEs) which form a bridge between certain sites on the T Cell and on the tumour cell. Anyone working with them to try to cure prostate cancer encounters two difficulties. Generally, traditional TCEs can be pretty indiscriminate, leading to side issues like massive cytokine storms and problems with dose toxicity. Specifically, prostate cancer cells have a knack of resisting T cells, making immunotherapy especially hard to apply. Now a team led by the admirable Professor de Bono in collaboration with Vir Biotechnology[2] is trialling a new form of molecular cloaking treatment called VIR-5500 which masks the T-cells right up to the moment when they are in contact with the prostate cancer cells. A protease in the malign cells then activates the T-cells, unleashing their curative effect. We won’t spoil Nicola’s summary of the results, which you can read in her article. But you will find them impressive to say the least.

All of which goes to show what curiosity-driven basic science can achieve when money is spent on it. VIR -5500 could not have existed without decades of molecular immunology, protein engineering, tumour cytology and many other disciplines hidden away in unmanly places like university departments and research institutes. Which is ironic, because many of the butch types at the Dog and Duck, who routinely perform their masculinities by loudly decrying scientific research into things like climate change, will be the first to suffer when prostate cancer comes along. But History always teaches the same lesson to the deluded in the end.

[1] Researchers praise ‘stunning’ results of new prostate cancer treatment | Prostate cancer | The Guardian

[2] Our Strategy | Vir Biotechnology

#prostate cancer #immunotherapy #t cells #health #medicine #science #molecular biology

Did Christopher Columbus start an Ice Age?

Photo by Balu00e1zs Gu00e1bor on Pexels.com

We know that rising levels of carbon dioxide are driving climate change. We know the mechanism, we know the statistics, and people all across the world are feeling the consequences in floods, fires, crop failures and migrations. But has CO₂ changed the climate before? More pertinently has human meddling with this potent greenhouse gas already unleashed a disaster or so? To our astonishment, some people think it has Stand by for an amazing idea we got from the BBC podcast In Our Time [1] of which more below.

When Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492 it was not to an empty, underpopulated hemisphere. Both American continents contained thriving populations of agriculturalists. Now, 1492 was indeed the start of huge exchanges of many things-foods, cultures, languages-between Old World and New. But among the earliest and most significant were European diseases like smallpox and measles to which the American populations had no resistance whatsoever. The result was a catastrophic mortality which carried off between 80 and 90% of them.[2] The abandoned farms and croplands quickly reverted to nature. Meaning a sudden massive capture of carbon dioxide which began to cool the planet quickly, leading to the famous Little Ice Age which reached its coldest in the early Seventeenth Century.

And the evidence ? The Little Ice Age is an incontrovertible fact. [3] Ice core samples and climate records indicate the early 17^th century as suffering some of the coldest decades in recorded history. But correlation is not cause, as we always say at this blog. Overall, it looks as if the trend towards the dip had started centuries before, and the recovery was still going on centuries afterwards. The cooling may well have been regional rather than global and there is strong evidence to suggest that other factors such as volcanoes and solar cycles may have played their part. However, that CO₂ is indeed such a potent greenhouse gas makes its role as a contributor to the Little Ice Age all too plausible. And that is what worries us about levels of the stuff shooting up so dramatically in our own times. Although not proven to the levels of certainty like tigers bite and smoking gives you cancer, we think there is enough here for further research, both by scientists and by you, gentle reader. And now on to our thanks.

Because In Our Time,now presented by the urbane Misha Glenny, is one of the greatest cornucopias of intellectual treasure you will find. gentle readers. By spending an hour in its company once a week you will discover the most eclectic range of fine subjects -Science, History, Art, literature, what have you, all presented by leading experts at Tertiary education level or above(see LSS 9 6 22) In an age where so much media chases sensation over substance, its very existence is a reminder that rationality and intelligence still have a place. And we know we have that on the Highest Authority: read this if you don’t believe us:

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver. And the gain thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her

Proverbs 3 12-15

[1] BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, The Columbian Exchange

[2] Columbian exchange – Wikipedia

[3] Reconciling ice core CO2 and land-use change following New World-Old World contact

#global warming #pandemic #columbus #in out Time #little ice age

Trump, Tariffs and the arc of History

President Trump Postlaunch Remarks (NHQ202005300037) by NASA HQ PHOTO is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

Availability bias: it’s one of the great errors of the human mind, from selection of romantic partners to the decisions of statesmen on whether to enter major geopolitical wars. We get cross because a Minister says this, or a football manager makes that decision. So it’s refreshing to come across an article that puts the stories flickering across our screens into a broader context. And this(uncredited) opinion piece from the Guardian does exactly that. Weaving threads of tariffs, Supreme Courts, President Trump, China, and economics it finds a historical parallel for all that’s going on-and why it matters.[1]

The writer asseverates that Mr Trump is trying to restore a lost America of the 1970s when its manufacturing and technological capacities were unchallenged. Now China, which has concentrated on manufacturing, has obtained an edge which increasingly threatens the US global position. And once that happens, the consequences for powers that go down are not nice. The historical parallel is clear: Britain neglected its manufacturing base from the 1870s onwards, relying on financial services and the strength of sterling to maintain its dominance. In the end it was displaced by the manufacturing strength of the USA, and the inevitable loss of reserve currency status was the final nail in the coffin of British Power.[2]

Unlike many, we do not question Mr Trump’s intelligence, nor patriotism by his own lights at least. But these qualities may not ensure optimal decisions. Nostalgia is a dangerous force. For often the golden ages it longs for were exactly the times when the fatal decisions were made. America chose the path of financialisaton over manufacturing in the 1980s : so to want to go back there is to want to repeat that mistake. Mr Trump has come too late to arrest America’s decline, whatever he decides about tariffs, immigrants or anything else. The basic problem of the United States is a hopelessly skewed balance of money and information between rich and poor, Until that is fixed, the trajectory will continue one way.

[1] The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s tariffs: a nostalgia that misreads a changed world | Editorial | The Guardian

[2] Barnett, Correlli. The Collapse of British Power. New York: William Morrow, 1972. ISBN: 0688000010

#economics #history #USA #china #great britain #reserve currency #financialisation #manufacturing

IsoDDE: mixed-race love child of Biology and Information Science has a great future

One of the most exciting stories we have followed at this blog is the way new AI systems are suddenly speeding up the production of new drugs and other biological molecules (see LSS 1 12 20 et al) This week has seen another exciting step in the form of a new AI tool from Isomorphic labs. Read this piece, Drug discovery AI is akin to Alpha Fold 4 from Nature Briefing

Isomorphic Labs — a biopharmaceutical spin-off of Google DeepMind — has unveiled a new, powerful artificial-intelligence tool for predicting how proteins interact with drugs. The tool, called IsoDDE, can outperform other AI systems such as the open-source Boltz-2 and physics-based methods at determining binding affinity between a protein and potential drug. These skills have impressed scientists, but they highlight that IsoDDE is proprietary, and the technical paper that accompanied its announcement offers scant insight into how to achieve similar results.

Nature | 5 min read

The research and development of new drugs is one of the most arduous tasks that befalls the intelligent community. The central problem is pretty simple: how do you get your marvellous new drug to stick to a protein, and make the whole thing work the way you want it to? Proteins are not hard rigid statues of marble: they are soft, spongy and change shape in unpredictable ways when you put a new drug up against them. That’s the gap in function into which all that time, money and thought disappears. In theory new AI tools like Iso DDE (and others on the way no doubt) should rapidly speed the whole process by predicting myriad of possible shape changes as the molecular systems are brought together.[2] Moreover, to predict new bits on the target protein which we hadn’t thought of, where the drug might be made to stick to, And possibly, to crunch the numbers around all those new bits of protein, polypeptide and other molecules which are thrown up in the research process, to see if they have any likely uses as well. When we were young, Information Science and Biology were completely different disciplines with different faculties, buildings and career paths. It’s funny to watch them coming together so fructiferously, to produce such exciting offspring

[2]https://storage.googleapis.com/isomorphiclabs-website-public-artifacts/isodde_technical_report.pdf

#drugs #medicines #researh #AI #biology #health

Can your cat save you from cancer?

Cats: our feline friends: variously cute, lovable, admirable and beautiful. They’re becoming more and popular as pets. Which brings several advantages in the treatment of cancer, believe it or not. Like dogs, their nearest rival, they are exposed to all the same molecular slings and arrows of everyday domestic life-cleaning products- foods, fuels, what have you-as we are. But we also share more genetic material with them then we do with our canine chums. Moreover cancer is rapidly becoming a major cause of mortality in middle aged to elderly cats just as it is to humans in that stage of. It’s a set up for ground breaking studies. And Miguel Ángel Criado for El País and Helen Briggs of the BBC have two excellent reports on a groundbreaking study which has done exactly that. (teaser: one of these links is in Spanish, and one in English-can you guess which?)

The study, co-led by the learned Dr Louise van der Weyden of the Wellcome-Sanger Institute is the first really large map of oncogenic(cancer related) aspects of the cat genome. It’s full of intriguing details, which you can read by clicking on the marvellous articles which we have hyperlinked. But we could not resist a tiny spoiler, concerning Dr Weyden’s discoveries around the gene FBXW7 , a tumour‑suppressor gene whose loss helps drive aggressive forms of human breast cancer. Intriguingly, the same gene is frequently mutated in feline tumours. This cross‑species echo suggests that cats and humans may share a conserved vulnerability in the FBXW7 pathway, making our kitties unexpected partners in understanding this cancer mechanism.

And the conclusion? We need to help cats to help us. You could give to a cancer charity [3] You could give to a cat charity[4] But knowing our readers to be generous types we have included sufficient hyperlinks for you to do both!

[1] El mayor mapa genético del cáncer de los gatos abre la puerta a tratamientos compartidos con humanos | Salud y bienestar | EL PAÍS

[2]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg3n7j8xyqo?at_campaign_type=owned&at_link_type=web_link&at_format=link&at_ptr_name=facebook_page&at_link_origin=BBC_N

[3] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/get-involved/donate?

[4] Cats Protection | UK’s Largest Cat Welfare Charity

#cancer #breast cancer #cats #medicine #health #research #genome #oncology

Another thank you-with special regard to our last post

Every so often we put out a thank you message here. Today’s has been particularly prompted by our earlier blog R+D=GDP……(LSS 22 2 26) in which we drew attention to the achievements of the Swiss nation, whose attainments in scientific research have done so much to afford their citizens the good life.

We have had a number of responses, from many lands , which suggest we got something right We wondered what that might be. And someone in the office came up with this. “the world is full of many belief systems. Religions, philosophies, rationalisations, call them what you will. Many of these in turn are no doubt strongly held and deeply felt by their adherents. and we would contradict non of them. But sometimes, just sometimes, a simple truth is lying there in the statistics or the history books or somewhere. A sudden flash of enlightenment to illuminate the path of all of us. And the Swiss statistics are just one such example” That’s the gist of it anyway.

We hope you enjoyed the blog. And the beautiful pictures with which we illustrated it: compared to some countries they were not difficult to find . If they tempt you to visit that happy land to find out for yourself, be warned ! The general consensus is that it can be a bit pricey. [1] Both of which observations are, in our opinion, proof perfect of a high-GDP, well-run country, where even the mountains get taken in and cleaned. And a stark warning to countries who have suddenly decided to cut all their major R and D products. Oh well. Perhaps their children will earn a living entertaining Swiss tourists at rodeo shows.

[1]https://www.neverendingfootsteps.com/cost-of-travel-switzerland-budget/

#switzerland #USA #GDP #research #science #economics

R+D=GDP A maths lesson the Swiss can teach the world

Sit quietly in any pub or cafe and you will soon learn why the economy is performing so badly. Most of the diagnoses centre round a few simple tropes: wages are too high, holidays too long, taxes are too heavy, hours worked are too short…….Now, we would not dare to cross the opinions of the towering intellects you find in the bar of the Dog and Duck (it’s physically unsafe anyway ) But we dare to offer an alternative explanation for why economic growth works so well for some countries, just for your consideration, gentle readers. And the answer is: the amount that each country spends on Research and Development,

Let’s take Switzerland as our shiny example. It’s a tiny country constituting only 0.1% of the world’s population. But its R and D spend (3.4% of GDP) puts at 6th place in the global ranking of R&D. The result is a highly diverse export orientated economy, a well embedded public-private sector ecosystem of research institutes, universities schools and so on. All of which puts it almost at the top of the GDP per head league. . There are local advantages: it has strong stable institutions, membership of the EU single market and a low defence spend. Other countries share all or some of these advantages to a greater or lesser extent. We could argue for paragraphs about the pull and tug of these various factors. But we think one lesson is unavoidable, writ both large and small

Writ large, technology is the true game changer for economies. The advent of steam power in the industrial revolution utterly transformed both the out put and wealth of the nations which adopted it. However many hours humans and their animals laboured, they could never match the colossal output capabilities of powered engines. And technology only grows from a huge ecosystem of more general research and scholarship. Current debates aside, Industrial Revolutions are rare. But they can be mimicked by a pipeline of small steady innovations in many fields, which achieve the same things. This is the lesson writ small, which the Swiss have learned par excellence. Tap room philosophers may be excellent at the book keeping needs of their various small enterprises. But they are blind to the bigger lessons: on this matter and many others.

[1]https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/research-and-development

[2]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1023591/niesr-report.pdf

#R&D #science #technology #universities #investment #GDP growth

Stanford’s new discovery is a marvel-but can we really call it a vaccine?

Today we are happy to present one of the best news stories we’ve ever covered in our long years on this blog. It’s the announcement of a new type of vaccine from Stanford University. But it’s so mind bogglingly different from all the others we’ve come across that we genuinely wonder if it should be called vaccine at all! The details may be found in this crisp article from the excellent James Gallagher of the BBC [1] Essentially, it’s a nasal spray, so far tested only in mice, that offers protection against several viruses including colds, flu and COVID 19. Also against bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus and Acinetobacter baumannii, two long known antibiotic resistant inhabitants of these pages.

Now, traditional vaccines have worked the same way ever since the pioneering work of Jenner. One organism=one vaccine, with the immune system trained to recognise one small target area of the invading organism. It’s as precise as a sniper; but can only ever protect you against one disease. The brilliant team at Stanford have taken an utterly new approach and decided to tackle the pathway by which a whole bunch or organisms make their attack. In this case the lungs. So it doesn’t matter if you are hit with a COVID 19 virus, the common cold, flu, the bacterial chums we noted above or even certain allergens. The macrophages of the lungs have been fired up and stand ready to repel any hostile borders-and will remain that way for several months[2]

Right, back to the question we started with: as this is so different from anything we were taught in school, can we really call it a vaccine? Well. If you define a vaccine as “ a molecular entity that trains the immune system to respond more effectively to a future biological threat” then yes, it is. But compared to the old ones it is a conceptual leap of awesome power. We doubt it will replace “old -skool” specific vaccines; their efficacy is just too good to waste. But as a completely new, game changing intellectual concept-well we think the sky’s the limit

[1] Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say – BBC News

[2] Science (2026)
“An intranasal vaccine activating innate immune danger pathways protects mice against diverse respiratory pathogens.”
Published: 19 February 2026

Lead author: Dr. Olivia Martinez, PhD
Stanford University School of Medicine
Department of Microbiology & Immunology

#health #vaccine #colds #flu #antibiotic resistance #virus #bacteria #immune system

Meet the influencers trying to clean up the internet

The invention of the internet has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you can instantly discover how many stars a Thai restaurant in Benidorm has earned. On the other, it has unleashed a torrent of unregulated and often misleading information — particularly on subjects like medicine and meteorology, where accuracy can genuinely matter. Now, a gallant group of educated rationalists has taken it upon themselves to counter some of this misinformation, as reported by Nature Briefing.: Science Influences go viral:

To combat the swathes of scientific misinformation circulating on social media platforms such as TikTok, scientists and medical experts are taking strategies straight out of the influencer playbook. Some content creators try to ‘pre-bunk’ misinformation by reaching a broad audience with peer-reviewed evidence on topics such as climate change. Others, such as Doctor Mike, challenge it head-on by fact-checking specific claims, including those by US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The task can be difficult for individual creators, who can face personal backlash, but it’s important to meet audiences where they are, says creator Simon Clark. Research has shown that these efforts can help to shift the dial on issues such as vaccine hesitancy.Nature | 10 min read

We’ve often thought that the world of the internet is a bit like those old Victorian towns in the early Industrial Revolution, where their were no regulations about anything. So anyone could belch out anything they liked from their chimneys. And could put almost anything in a tin and call it food. Gradually laws were passed regulating pollution. Other laws imposed strict standards on what could be produced and sold. That was for physical things, of course. Isn’t time we had the same safeguards on all things digital?

#internet #pollution #misinformation #rational #fact check