I am happy to say that we have reached our subscriber milestone, and we will now try to stick to a monthly publication schedule. Next increase in publication frequency - when we reach 50 subscribers. And now to the news…
If you have avoided the Stockholm syndrome…
Nobel Prize season is upon us! So far, two noteworthy announcements:
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2022 was awarded to the Svante Pääbo, one of the founders of paleogenetics, for his discoveries on human evolution, in particular our shared history with the Neanderthals. More below.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for for experiments establishing the violation of Bell inequalities. More below.
The chemistry and economics prizes will be announced soon. (We know, the economics prize is not really a Nobel Prize.) We may post an emergency edition if warranted.
We were not alone
Svante Pääbo was awarded the Nobel in recognition of his pioneering work on extracting DNA from skeletal remains and using it to uncover the evolutionary history of humans. Read the detailed description.
Many things are noteworthy about this award: The award is not shared with other scientists. This is a rare honor since most recent Nobels are. Pääbo’s father, Sune K. Bergström, was himself a Nobelist. Finally, work on evolution is rarely recognized by Nobel Prizes.
The Nobel committee apparently considered the revolutionary insights brought by paleogenetics to be noteworthy enough. Svante Pääbo developed many of the techniques in the field, and established that Home sapiens and Homo neandertalensis coexisted in Eurasia for at least 20,000 years and discovered a third cousin species, the Denisova.
Not only that: we now know that sapiens and neandertalensis exchanged genes. These discoveries changed our understanding of human evolution. The Nobel committee recognized this. We approve.
The quantum world is weird
Two particles, that can be arbitrarily far away from each other, may be entangled in the sense that while both are in an indeterminate state, measuring the state of one also determines the state of the other. This breaks our assumptions about the locality of physics to such an extent that in 1935 Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen posed this as a paradox undermining quantum mechanics (The EPR paradox).
In 1964 John Bell argued that there is no simple solution to this problem, using secret local information, affectionately referred to as hidden variables. This is because in the quantum level it is possible to violate the Bell inequalities.
If [a hidden-variable theory] is local it will not agree with quantum mechanics, and if it agrees with quantum mechanics it will not be local. — John Stewart Bell
The Bell inequalities make it possible to differentiate between quantum mechanics’ indeterminacy and an alternative description.
The winners of this year’s Nobel prize showed experimentally that the Bell inequalities are violated, confirming John Bell’s ideas. The world is confirmed to be weird.
Read the detailed description of their work.
Is gene therapy about to deliver?
Gene therapy has been the holy grail for many years. So far with meager results. Some changes on this front.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved bluebird bio's ($BLUE.O) drug SKYSONA, a gene therapy that slows the progression of active Cerebral Adrenoleukodystrophy (CALD) in boys, a rare neurological disorder.
The drug adds functional copies of the missing gene ABCD1 to the patient's stem cells to help produce a protein required to break down the long-chain fatty acids.
In August the FDA approved bluebird’s drug Zynteglo for the treatment of beta thalassemia. It is also based on inserting a functional copy of a missing gene. The drug is said to be the most expensive drug on the market. However, investors continue to have doubts about the stock.
Speaking of Neanderthals…
We end this edition with yet more exciting news about the neanderthal genome.
The TKTL1 in modern humans has a single amino acid change—from lysine to arginine—from the version found in Neanderthals and other mammals. By inserting this version into mice researchers suggests that a single gene is the reason modern humans grow more brain cells than Neanderthals. Wow!
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