Geckos, tree frogs, spiders and insects all share a special skill – they can walk up vertical surfaces and even upside down using adhesive pads on their feet. But geckos have ‘dry’ feet, while insects have ‘wet’ feet.

Scientists have assumed that the two groups use different mechanisms to keep their feet firmly attached to a surface, but new research from David Labonte and Dr Walter Federle in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology provides evidence that this isn’t actually the case.

“It has generally been assumed that the fluid on their feet must be involved in helping insects like stick insects adhere to a surface by capillary and viscous forces – in the same way that a beer glass will stick to a glass table if it’s wet on the bottom,” explains Labonte, lead author of the study published in Soft Matter, “but our research shows that the fluid is likely used for something else entirely – it may even help insects unstick their feet.”

By measuring how much force was required to detach the foot of a stick insect from a glass plate at different speeds and applying the theory of fracture mechanics, Labonte and Federle found that only a ‘dry’ contact model could explain the data. They also carried out a comparison of the sticking performance of wet and dry adhesive pads, which revealed that there is a striking lack of differences between the two, contrary to previous opinion.

Insects and geckos need to walk up vertical surfaces and even upside down in order to get to the places where they feed and to escape from predators. As smooth surfaces don’t allow them to grip with their claws, they need soft adhesive pads on their feet and legs. This means they need to have excellent control over adhesion – to ensure their feet stick when they want them to, but can also unstick easily to allow them to walk around or run away from predators.

“Both wet and dry adhesive pads behave in a similar way to soft, rubbery materials in that, when they are pressed against another surface, there is a large area of contact between the two surfaces,” says Labonte. Both pad types then rely on shear forces to control their stickiness: insect and gecko feet are much stickier when they are pulled towards the body.

“The fluid that insects have on their adhesive pads doesn’t seem to increase the pads' stickiness by means of capillary or viscous forces, and the same may hold for the fluid on the feet of spiders and tree frogs.”

So what is this fluid for?

Labonte and Federle believe it may act as a ‘release layer’ to help insects unstick their feet when they want to move. “If you think of commercial adhesives, like Scotch tape, there are often bits of tape or residue left behind when you remove it quickly. But a stick insect needs to be able to unstick its feet without expending a lot of energy or leaving bits of its foot still stuck to a leaf,” explains Federle.

“The fluid may act as a lubricant to make detachment easier, giving insects greater control over adhesion at very short timescales.”

“When the first microscopes were invented in the 17th century, one of the first things scientists looked at was a fly’s foot. The purpose of the fluid that you find on insects’ feet has remained a fascinating question ever since,” says Labonte.

But it’s not just an age-old question that this research is helping to answer. The researchers say there may be lessons to learn for modern manmade devices.

“Understanding how insects control adhesion could have applications where adhesion is needed in a dynamic context, for instance in the production of small electronic devices, where it’s necessary to pick up and place down tiny parts with ease and accuracy,” adds Federle.

This research was enabled by funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Human Frontier Science Programme.

Reference:

David Labonte and Walter Federle ‘Rate-dependence of ‘wet’ biological adhesives and the function of the pad secretion in insects’ Soft Matter (2015).

Inset images: Composite figure showing the adhesive pad on the foot of a stick insect (T Endlein and David Labonte); Stick insect (T Endlein); Ant's foot showing a fluid trail (Walter Federle).

New research shows a difference between the sexes in immature chimpanzees when it comes to preparing for adulthood by practising object manipulation – considered ‘preparation’ for tool use in later life. 

Researchers studying the difference in tool use between our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, found that immature bonobos have low rates of object manipulation, in keeping with previous work showing bonobos use few tools and none in foraging.

Chimpanzees, however, are the most diverse tool-users among non-human primates, and the researchers found high rates of a wide range of object manipulation among the young chimpanzees they studied.

While in adult wild chimpanzees it is females that are more avid and competent tool users, in juvenile chimpanzees the researchers conversely found it was the young males that spent more time manipulating objects, seemingly in preparation for adult tool use.

“In numerous mammalian species, sex differences in immatures foreshadow sex differences in the behaviour of adults, a phenomenon known as ‘preparation’,” said Dr Kathelijne Koops, who conducted the work at the University of Cambridge’s Division of Biological Anthropology, as well as at the Anthropological Institute and Museum at Zurich University.

Much of the time young male chimpanzees spent manipulating objects was dominated by ‘play’: with no apparent immediate goal, and often associated with a ‘play face’ – a relaxed expression of laughing or covering of upper teeth.

The sex bias for object manipulation the researchers found in juvenile chimpanzees is also found in human children. “The finding that in immature chimpanzees, like humans, object-oriented play is biased towards males may reflect a shared evolutionary history for this trait dating back to our last common ancestor,” write the researchers from Cambridge, Zurich and Kyoto, who studied communities of wild chimpanzees and bonobos in Uganda and Congo for several months, cataloguing not just all tool use, but all object manipulation. 

Immature females, on the other hand, showed lower rates of object manipulation, especially in play, but displayed a much greater diversity of manipulation types than males – such as biting, breaking or carrying objects – rather than the play-based repetition seen in the object manipulation of immature males.

This seems to prepare the females better for future tool use. In an earlier study at Gombe (Tanzania), immature female chimpanzees were also observed to pay closer attention to their mothers using tools and became proficient tool users at an earlier age than males.

“Immature females seem to focus their attention on relevant tool use related tasks and thus learn quicker, whereas males seem to do more undirected exploration in play,” write the researchers.  

They say they believe the findings show that not all object manipulation in juvenile chimpanzees is preparation for tool use, and the different types of object manipulation need to be considered. 

The researchers say that the apparent similarity between human children and young chimpanzees in the observed male bias in object manipulation, and manipulation during play in particular, may suggest that object play functions as motor skill practice for male-specific behaviours such as dominance displays, which sometimes involve the aimed throwing of objects, rather than purely to develop tool use skills.

However, the researchers also point out that further work is needed to disentangle possible functions of object manipulation during development.

“We found that young chimpanzees showed higher rates and, importantly, more diverse types of object manipulation than bonobos. Despite being so closely related on the evolutionary tree, as well as to us, these species differ hugely in the way they use tools, and clues about the origins of human tool mastery could lie in the gulf between chimpanzees and bonobos,” Koops said.

“We found that male chimpanzees showed higher object manipulation rates than females, but their object manipulation was dominated by play. Young female chimpanzees showed much more diverse object manipulation types,” she said.

“We suggest that the observed male bias in young chimpanzees may reflect motor skill practice for male-specific behaviours, such as dominance displays, rather than for tool use skills. It seems that not all object manipulation in immatures prepares for subsistence tool use. It is important to take the types of manipulation into consideration.”  

The researchers also found that in chimpanzees, but not bonobos, the types of objects manipulated became more tool-like as the apes age. “As young chimpanzees get older they switch to manipulating predominantly sticks, which in this community is the tool type used by adults to harvest army ants,” Koops explained.

This practice of ant ‘dipping’, when chimpanzees lure streams of insects onto a stick, then scoop them up by running a hand along the stick and into the mouth, provides a quick source of protein.

Koops added: “Given the close evolutionary relationship between chimpanzees, bonobos and humans, insights into species and sex differences in ‘preparation’ for tool use between chimpanzees and bonobos can help us shed light on the functions of the highly debated gender differences among children.”

The research is published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

The year was 1789; the place Bengal. Isaac Newton’s masterpiece Principia
 Mathematica was being translated for only the third time in its already 100-year-old history; this time, into Arabic.

The author of this remarkable feat of scholarship was Tafazzul Husain Khan. According to a member of the ruling East India Company: “Khan… by translating the works of the immortal Newton, has conducted those imbued with Arabick literature to the fountain of all physical and astronomical knowledge.”

For Professor Simon Schaffer, who has researched the story of Tafazzul’s achievements, the complex work of translation is deeply significant. Tafazzul worked with scholars in English, Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit language communities in his efforts to connect Newtonian theories with the Indo-Persian intellectual tradition. For Tafazzul was, as Schaffer describes, “a go-between”.

“The ‘go-betweens’ are the individuals who, across the centuries, have been the cogs that have kept science moving,” he explains. “They are the knowledge brokers and translators, networkers and messengers – the original ‘knowledge transfer facilitators’. Their role may have disappeared from mainstream histories of science, but their tradecraft has been indispensable to the globalisation of science.”

Schaffer and Dr Sujit Sivasundaram are historians of science with an interest in understanding how the seeds of scientific knowledge have spread and grown. They believe that the global history of science is really the history of shifts and reinventions of a variety of ways of doing science across the world.

They, and others, have called for a retelling of science’s past, not only to be more “culturally symmetric” but also because the issue has enormous contemporary relevance.

“A standard tale is that modern science spread around the world from Western Europe, starting about 500 years ago based on the work of those such as Newton, Copernicus and Galileo, and then Darwin, Einstein, and so on,” explains Schaffer. “But this narrative about the globalisation of science just doesn’t work at all. It ignores a remarkable process of knowledge exchange that happened between the East and West for centuries.”

“Successful science is seen to be universal in its applicability,” adds Sivasundaram. “Yet, accounts of scientific discovery, heroism and priority have been part and parcel of a political narrative of competitive ownership by empires, nations and civilisations. To tease this story apart, we focus on the exchanges and ‘silencings’ across political configurations that are central to the rise of science on the global stage.”

Over the past two years, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, he and Schaffer have undertaken a programme of debates to ask whether a transregional rather than a Eurocentric history of science could now be told.

To do so, they teamed up with researchers in India and Africa, including Professor Irfan Habib from Delhi’s National University of Educational Planning and Administration and Professor Dhruv Raina of Jawarhalal Nehru University, and in December 2014 held an international workshop at the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi. “And now our debate is also being carried forward by a new generation of early-career researchers who came to the workshop,” adds Sivasundaram.

One conundrum the researchers debated was how global narratives of science could have been missed by scholars for so long. It largely stems from the use of source materials says Schaffer: “It’s an archival problem: as far as the production and preservation of sources is concerned, those connected with Europe far outweigh those from other parts of the world.”

“If we are to de-centre from Europe, we need to use radically new kinds of sources – monuments, sailing charts, courtly narratives, and so on,” explains Sivasundaram. He gives an example of Sri Lankan palm-leaf manuscripts: “The Mahavamsa
is a Buddhist chronicle of the history of Sri Lanka spanning 25 centuries. Among the deeds of the last kings of Kandy, I noticed seemingly inconsequential references to temple gardens. This led me back to the colonial archive documenting the creation of a botanic garden in 1821, and I realised that the British had ‘recycled’ a Kandyan tradition of gardening, by building their colonial garden on the site of a temple garden.”

Moreover, says Sivasundaram, the mechanisms of knowledge assimilation are often overlooked. Europeans often accumulated knowledge in India by engaging with pandits, or learned men. “The Europeans did not have a monopoly over the combination of science and empire – the pioneering work of Chris Bayly [see panel] shows how they fought to take over information networks and scientific patronage systems that were already in place. For Europeans to practice astronomy in India, for instance, it meant translating Sanskrit texts and engaging with pandits.”

“Very often, scientific achievement is used as a standard to measure a country’s progress because science and technology can intervene in problems of hunger, disease and development,” adds Sivasundaram. “If a biased history of science is told, then the past can become what Irfan Habib has called a ‘battlefield’, instead of a ‘springboard’ for future research or indeed for conversation across cultures.”

This is why, says Schaffer, it becomes so important to provide a better account of the worldly interaction between the kinds of knowledge communicated, the agents of communication – like Tafazzul Husain Khan – and the paths they travelled. 

Researchers led by the Francis Crick institute recently applied to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for a licence to genetically modify human embryos. The research would use the genome editing technique CRISPR/Cas9 to shed light on the genetic causes of defect of miscarriages in pregnancy.

This is a controversial move, which would make the UK the only country in the world apart from China to carry out such research. It is absolutely crucial that we have an informed debate about it, consulting the public in a meaningful way, before scientists and policymakers set its parameters. To this end, a team of researchers working with the website WhatIsBiotechnology.org are running a pilot survey to gather people’s views on the new technology. This will include its use in human embryo modification but also look beyond that to other applications.

HFEA’s expanding remit

The HFEA has been regulating in-vitro fertilisation and research on human embryos and human embryonic stem cells in the UK since 1990. That year, a 14-day cut-off for research to take place in-vitro was established following the recommendations put forward in the Warnock report.

The question now in the minds of many is whether the UK needs new regulations. In the past ten years, the scope of the HFEA regulation has been expanding, not narrowing. For example, in 2006 scientists from King’s College London and Newcastle University applied to the HFEA to work on cybrids. Also known as cytoplasmic hybrid embryos, cybrids are embryos derived from creating an egg in the laboratory using the nucleus of a human cell derived from a patient and the mitochondria from a rabbit or cow. The goal was to create patient-specific human cell lines to model human diseases in-vitro.

The HFEA approved this work in 2008 by amending the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 to specify the definition of “human admixed embryos”. The applications of cybrids were soon superseded by the introduction of other techniques. One of these was induced pluripotent stem cells– cells that have the ability to form nearly all the cells and tissues in the body – which seemed to avoid many of the ethical conundrums raised by crossing different species.

In 2015, the HFEA scope was further expanded to allow mitochondrial DNA replacement techniques, which use genetic material from three people to create an embryo free of mitochondrial disease.

The scope of HFEA regulation could very well be expanded again to include applications of CRISPR/Cas9 to embryo research. If this happens, it will provide for licences for very specific applications of the technology. This is unlikely to be a “blanket licence” or to go beyond the 14-day limit of research in-vitro.

International divide

The recent call by US scientists for a temporary pause “in the application of germ-line modification for clinical application in humans while the implications of such activity are discussed” has added a new intensity to the debate and reveals a potential bioethical divide between the US and the UK.

The proposed moratorium has been hailed in some quarters as a positive step toward preserving the public’s trust and safety but because of its narrow focus on the germ-line, it also prevents alternative views from surfacing in the debate and constrains the boundaries of the much called-for public engagement with the issue.

Until now, the debate around the use of CRISPR/Cas9 has been framed in two opposing ways. On the one hand the technology is seen as a promising tool for advancing medical knowledge and treatment. Counter-balancing this is the view that it poses serious risk to the future because of its eugenic potential to create “designer babies”. This way of framing the debate can be harmful, as it elicits a particular public response. It also prevents engagement with other issues raised by CRISPR/Cas9 beyond the germ-line. These include important work such as creating humanised animal models for organ transplant, genetically modifying insects to eliminate those that carry diseases, including malaria, and creating better engineered crops.

Parallels have been drawn between the action of the US scientists and the Asilomar conference in Caifornia in 1975. The conference was set up to discuss the biohazards presented by a new technique published in 1973 for producing recombinant DNA. The meeting called for scientists to temporarily halt use of the technology while guidelines were deliberated. Drawing parallels with the Asilomar conference, however, is inappropriate. Although the conference has gained memorable, almost mythical, status in the eye of scientists, who treat it as a model for scientific responsibility and control, 40 years of science and technology studies have challenged this view.

Some scholars have argued that the conference and the guidelines it established can be read as an attempt to keep the regulation of biotechnology within the professional boundaries of science. In this way, external regulation and tough questions about science in society were avoided. Going forward, the conference also set in motion a particular approach in how to handle new technological challenges.

As the historian of science and medicine Ben Hurlbut, reminds us: “Technological controversies have come and gone, but modes of reacting to them have come to be patterned and institutionalised.” This highlights the need to be critical of reactive patterns in bioethics and for active public engagement. It is also a reminder of such debates are framed by particular economic, social and political factors in different countries.

Seeing the full picture

At a time when the genome editing technology is still in its infancy and its applications remain unclear, it is important to engage the public in a dialogue that moves beyond considerations of the use of the technology in the germ-line. While predictions about the evolution of the technology are always hazardous and often wrong, it is vital to capture what people think about it before decisions are made.

To this end we have launched a pilot survey to gauge what different members of the public think about what genome editing is and can do, what sources of information they use to understand the technology and how well informed they feel on the issue.

The survey also aims to capture what images, ideas or associations people have when they think about CRISPR/Cas9. Capturing this aspect of the public response is important as it can shape the boundaries of the ethical debate and the thinking of policy-makers.

Aiming to provide a more reflective and less reactive and “institutionalised” mode of doing bioethics, the pilot survey aims to capture responses from as large a population as possible. It is aimed at university students, school students, industry experts, scientists, healthcare practitioners, patient groups and charity workers from the UK, continental Europe, US, and China.

To contribute to the survey please go to: http://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/survey/index/670a773b/conv12 Results are to be published both online through WhatisBiotechnology.org and other media outlets.

Silvia Camporesi, Lecturer in Bioethics & Society, King's College London and Lara Marks, , University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The first ancient human genome from Africa to be sequenced has revealed that a wave of migration back into Africa from Western Eurasia around 3,000 years ago was up to twice as significant as previously thought, and affected the genetic make-up of populations across the entire African continent.

The genome was taken from the skull of a man buried face-down 4,500 years ago in a cave called Mota in the highlands of Ethiopia – a cave cool and dry enough to preserve his DNA for thousands of years. Previously, ancient genome analysis has been limited to samples from northern and arctic regions.

The latest study is the first time an ancient human genome has been recovered and sequenced from Africa, the source of all human genetic diversity. The findings are published today in the journal Science.

The ancient genome predates a mysterious migratory event which occurred roughly 3,000 years ago, known as the ‘Eurasian backflow’, when people from regions of Western Eurasia such as the Near East and Anatolia suddenly flooded back into the Horn of Africa.

The genome enabled researchers to run a millennia-spanning genetic comparison and determine that these Western Eurasians were closely related to the Early Neolithic farmers who had brought agriculture to Europe 4,000 years earlier.

By comparing the ancient genome to DNA from modern Africans, the team have been able to show that not only do East African populations today have as much as 25% Eurasian ancestry from this event, but that African populations in all corners of the continent – from the far West to the South – have at least 5% of their genome traceable to the Eurasian migration.      

Researchers describe the findings as evidence that the ‘backflow’ event was of far greater size and influence than previously thought. The massive wave of migration was perhaps equivalent to over a quarter of the then population of the Horn of Africa, which hit the area and then dispersed genetically across the whole continent.

“Roughly speaking, the wave of West Eurasian migration back into the Horn of Africa could have been as much as 30% of the population that already lived there – and that, to me, is mind-blowing. The question is: what got them moving all of a sudden?” said Dr Andrea Manica, senior author of the study from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.    

Previous work on ancient genetics in Africa had involved trying to work back through the genomes of current populations, attempting to eliminate modern influences. “With an ancient genome, we have a direct window into the distant past. One genome from one individual can provide a picture of an entire population,” said Manica.  

The cause of the West Eurasian migration back into Africa is currently a mystery, with no obvious climatic reasons. Archaeological evidence does, however, show the migration coincided with the arrival of Near Eastern crops into East Africa such as wheat and barley, suggesting the migrants helped develop new forms of agriculture in the region.      

The researchers say it’s clear that the Eurasian migrants were direct descendants of, or a very close population to, the Neolithic farmers that had had brought agriculture from the Near East into West Eurasia around 7,000 years ago, and then migrated into the Horn of Africa some 4,000 years later. “It’s quite remarkable that genetically-speaking this is the same population that left the Near East several millennia previously,” said Eppie Jones, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin who led the laboratory work to sequence the genome. 

While the genetic make-up of the Near East has changed completely over the last few thousand years, the closest modern equivalents to these Neolithic migrants are Sardinians, probably because Sardinia is an isolated island, says Jones. “The famers found their way to Sardinia and created a bit of a time capsule. Sardinian ancestry is closest to the ancient Near East.” 

View looking out from the Mota cave in the Ethiopian highlands

“Genomes from this migration seeped right across the continent, way beyond East Africa, from the Yoruba on the western coast to the Mbuti in the heart of the Congo – who show as much as 7% and 6% of their genomes respectively to be West Eurasian,” said Marcos Gallego Llorente, first author of the study, also from Cambridge’s Zoology Department.

“Africa is a total melting pot. We know that the last 3,000 years saw a complete scrambling of population genetics in Africa. So being able to get a snapshot from before these migration events occurred is a big step,” Gallego Llorente said.

The ancient Mota genome allows researchers to jump to before another major African migration: the Bantu expansion, when speakers of an early Bantu language flowed out of West Africa and into central and southern areas around 3,000 years ago. Manica says the Bantu expansion may well have helped carry the Eurasian genomes to the continent’s furthest corners.

The researchers also identified genetic adaptations for living at altitude, and a lack of genes for lactose tolerance – all genetic traits shared by the current populations of the Ethiopian highlands. In fact, the researchers found that modern inhabitants of the area highlands are direct descendants of the Mota man.

Finding high-quality ancient DNA involves a lot of luck, says Dr Ron Pinhasi, co-senior author from University College Dublin. “It’s hard to get your hands on remains that have been suitably preserved. The denser the bone, the more likely you are to find DNA that’s been protected from degradation, so teeth are often used, but we found an even better bone – the petrous.” The petrous bone is a thick part of the temporal bone at the base of the skull, just behind the ear.  

“The sequencing of ancient genomes is still so new, and it’s changing the way we reconstruct human origins,” added Manica. “These new techniques will keep evolving, enabling us to gain an ever-clearer understanding of who our earliest ancestors were.” 

The study was conducted by an international team of researchers, with permission from the Ethiopia’s Ministry of Culture and Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage.

Professor Lalita Ramakrishnan is, it’s fair to say, a world authority on the biology of TB. She studies the disease – one which most people will know of as a disease of the lungs – using what at first sight seems an unusual model: the zebrafish.

“What most people don’t realise is that about 40% of human TB occurs outside the lungs,” explains Ramakrishnan. “It can infect the brain, bone, heart, reproductive organs, skin, even the ear. In fact, TB infection is a basic biology question, and this is the same in zebrafish as it is in humans.”

TB is caused by Mycobacterium 
tuberculosis, which is generally transmitted from person to person through the air. It has been around since at least the Neolithic period, but its prevalence in 19th-century literature led it to be considered something of a ‘romantic’ disease. The truth is a long way from this portrayal. The disease can cause breathlessness, wasting and eventual death. And while treatments do exist, the drug regimen is one of the longest for any curable disease: a patient will typically need to take medication for six months.

Ramakrishnan is involved in a new trial due to start soon that might allow doctors to reduce the length of this treatment. She is cautiously optimistic that it can be reduced to four months; if successful, however, it may eventually lead to treatments more on a par with standard antibiotic treatments of a couple of weeks.

The trial builds on work in zebrafish carried out by Ramakrishnan and colleagues at the University of Washington, Seattle, before she moved to the Department of Medicine in Cambridge in September 2014. These small fish, which grow to the length of a little finger, helped her and collaborator Professor Paul Edelstein from the University of Pennsylvania (currently on sabbatical in Cambridge) to make an important discovery that could explain why it takes a six-month course of antibiotics to rid the body of the disease (rather than seven to ten days that most infections take) and yet in the lab can easily be killed.

Within our bodies, we have a host of specialist immune cells that fight infection. One of these is the macrophage (Greek for ‘big eater’). This cell engulfs the TB bacterium and tries to break it down. This, together with powerful antibiotics, should make eliminating TB from the body a cinch. Ramakrishnan’s breakthrough was to show why this wasn’t the case: once inside the macrophages, TB switches on pumps, known as ‘efflux pumps’. Anything that we throw at it, it just pumps back out again.

“Once we’d identified the pumps, we started to look for drugs that are out there in the market and tested a few of them,” she explains. “We found that verapamil, an old drug, made the bacteria susceptible to two of the antibiotics we use to fight TB.”

The trial of verapamil, which is commonly used to treat high blood pressure, is due to start soon at the National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT) in Chennai, India.

Ramakrishnan is one of a number of brilliant minds working as part of a collaboration between the NIRT and the University of Cambridge to apply the very latest in scientific thinking and technology to the problem of TB.

An expansion of this collaboration has now become possible through the recent award of a £2 million joint grant from the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in India, which will enable the exchange of British and Indian researchers. For Professor Sharon Peacock, the UK lead on the proposal, this means an opportunity to train a new cohort of early-career researchers in an environment where they will have access to outstanding scientific facilities and training, at the same time as becoming familiar with the clinical face and consequences of TB for people in India.

“India is home to a large pool of talented young people with the potential to help fight back against this deadly disease,” says Peacock. “Developing a close collaboration between Cambridge and Chennai involving two-way traffic of scientists and ideas is an exciting opportunity to start to tap into this.”

There are few places more suitable 
for the proposed work than India. According to the World Health Organization, India is home to almost one in four of all worldwide cases of TB, with over two million newly diagnosed cases in 2014.

Not only that, but it is one of the countries that has seen an increase in the number of cases of drug resistance to TB – including ‘multi-drug’-resistant, and even more worrying, ‘extremely’ drug-resistant strains of TB against which none of our first- and second-line drug treatments work. In part, this increase reflects improved access to diagnostic services, but the situation highlights why new approaches to tackling the disease are urgently needed, says Professor Soumya Swaminathan, Director of NIRT and the India lead in the collaboration.

“So far, the treatment of TB has focused almost exclusively on using drugs to try to kill the bacteria directly, but there’s increasing evidence that there may be benefits to targeting the host. TB is very clever and it manipulates the host immune system to its own advantage, so if we could use drugs to help the immune system, then we may be able to make it more effective.”

This is the approach that Professors Ken Smith and Andres Floto from the Department of Medicine at Cambridge, also part of the collaboration, are taking. Smith is looking at the role that specialist immune cells known as T cells play in the persistence of multi-drug-resistant strains of TB. His group has evidence that around two thirds of the population have T cells which have a tendency to become ‘exhausted’ when activated.

“It might be that exhausted T cells can’t fight multi-drug-resistant TB effectively, in which case we need to find a way to overcome this exhaustion and spur the T cells on to rid the body of the disease,” says Smith.

For Floto, the key may lie in the role played by the macrophages and their otherwise voracious appetites. As their Greek name suggests, macrophages ‘eat’ unwanted material (surprisingly similar in action to Pac-Man), effectively chewing it up, breaking it down and spitting it out again.

This process, known as autophagy (‘self-eating’), is a repair mechanism for clearing damaged bits of cells and recycling them for future use, but also works as a defence mechanism against some invading bacteria. So why, when it engulfs TB, does the bacterium manage to avoid being digested?

“Autophagy is partially inhibited by TB itself, but we found that if you overstimulate this mechanism – like flooring the accelerator of a car – you can overcome the bacteria,” explains Floto. “Clearly this will be applicable to normal TB, but we already have drugs that are effective against this. We want to know if this would work against multi-drug-resistant strains.”

Floto and colleagues already have a list of potential drugs that can stimulate autophagy, drugs that have already been licensed and are in use to treat other conditions, such as carbamazepine, which is used to treat epileptic seizures. These drugs are safe to use: the question is, will they work against TB?

“We’ve already shown that carbamazepine stimulates autophagy in cells to kill TB – even multi-drug-resistant TB. We now want to refine it and test it in mice and in fish, alongside a shortlist of around 30 other potential drugs,” he adds.

TB evolves through ‘polymorphisms’ – spontaneous changes in the letters of its DNA to create variants. Because the drug regimen to fight the disease lasts so long, many patients do not take the full course of their medicines. If the TB is allowed to relapse, it can evolve drug resistance.

These patterns of resistance can be detected using genome sequencing – reading the DNA of the bacteria. Peacock believes this technique may be able to help doctors more easily diagnose drug resistance in patients.

“TB is very slow to grow in the laboratory, which means that testing an organism to confirm which antibiotics it is susceptible or resistant to can take several weeks, especially in the case of more resistant strains,” she says. “There is increasing evidence that antibiotic resistance can be predicted from the genome sequence of the organism, and we want to establish and evaluate this technology in India, where it is needed.”

This sequencing data could also then help inform the search for new drugs, explains Professor Sir Tom Blundell from the Department of Biochemistry. He is no stranger to TB: his grandfather died from the disease shortly after the war – though, as Blundell points out, this strain of TB is far less common now, as the organism has evolved in different communities throughout the world.

“We can take the polymorphisms and ask questions such as ‘What does this mean for the use of current drugs?’” says Blundell. “The nature of the polymorphisms in the TB genome sequence of an infected individual can give us information on where that person was infected and what are the drugs that might be most effective. We can then begin to look at new targets for particular polymorphisms.”

Blundell plans to take the information gathered through the Chennai partnership and feed it into his drug discovery work. He takes a structural approach to solving the problem: look at the shape of the polymorphism and its protein products and try to find small molecules that can attach to and manipulate them. In essence, it’s akin to picking a lock by analysing the shape of its mechanism and trying to identify a key that could turn it, thus opening the door.

Yet even if the Chennai venture is successful, and research from the partnership leads to a revolution in how we understand and treat TB, the team recognise that this is unlikely to be enough to eradicate the disease for good.

“TB is as much a public health issue as one of infectious diseases,” says Ramakrishnan, pointing to Europe, where even before the introduction of antibiotics, the disease was already on the decline. “We need better nutrition, better air, less smoking, reductions in diabetes.”

Swaminathan agrees. “TB is very much associated with poverty and all the risk factors that go with it,” she says. “When people are living in very crowded conditions, when they’re malnourished, TB is going to continue to spread. This is happening in the slums of Mumbai, for example, where we’re seeing a mini-epidemic of multi-drug-resistant TB. Unless we see a rapid improvement in the living standards of people we’re not going to see a very major effect. There’s only so much we can do biomedically.”

Inset image: Macrophage engulfing Tuberculosis pathogen (ZEISS Microscopy).

Held by the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, 43,000 pages of papers will be opened to the public from Monday, revealing in close detail the concerns, challenges and crises faced by Thatcher during a year which marked her tenth anniversary as leader and the halfway point in her premiership.

Thatcher’s papers also reveal growing disquiet within Tory Party ranks about Labour’s recovery following the miners’ strike, as well as a general sense of Conservative malaise, and the wrangling Prime Minister Thatcher underwent as she planned and announced her Cabinet reshuffle.

Chris Collins from the Margaret Thatcher Archives Trust, which owns the papers, said the newly-released documents give a sense of the pressures on Thatcher, both domestically, internationally, and closer to home – with her press secretary attempting to soften the image of the Iron Lady.

“The early papers for 1985 are dominated by the unfinished business of the coal strike,” said Collins. “Thatcher’s advisers were worried that Arthur Scargill might still manage to find a way to out-manoeuvre them. The papers show Thatcher closely involved in the aftermath of the strike. Although its outcome is now seen as decisive, the possibility of another strike was not discounted at the time. Thatcher wrote a note on March 7, 1985 saying ‘what a relief it’s all over… we shall rebuild stocks of coal at power stations as a first priority.’”

Elsewhere, Thatcher wrote: “We have shattered the myth that the miners can always bring a government down. And it is clear beyond all doubt that we will never give in to violence.”

But the end of the battle with Scargill and the miners did not provide the boost to Conservative popularity that many in the party imagined. In fact, Thatcher’s papers for 1985 suggest the reverse is true with press secretary Bernard Ingham’s press clippings showing how Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s conference speech won plaudits from both the Sun and the Daily Mail.

Perhaps one of the most curious revelations from the release of this year’s papers comes via the many pages of correspondence generated by multiple branches of the government machine over Thatcher’s potential non-attendance at a St Paul’s memorial service.

The papers for 1985 reveal that the Church of England and Downing Street clashed over proposals to exclude the Prime Minister from the unveiling of the Falklands Memorial at St Paul’s Cathedral.

Thatcher was said to have responded angrily to suggestions that there would not be room for her in the crypt alongside the Queen, church and military officials. The row followed a high-profile falling-out between Mrs Thatcher and the then Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie after the latter had prayed for Argentinian dead in a 1982 memorial service.

Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine unwisely allowed a letter to reach the Prime Minister showing him signing off on the agreement to hold the service without her. On the letter, in Mrs Thatcher’s own hand, she has scrawled the words which must have made many a minister’s blood turn to ice: ‘Kindly ask the secretary of state to see me immediately.’ The word ‘immediately’, just in case her displeasure was unclear, is underlined twice.

Mrs Thatcher’s lack of popularity with the Church of England also seemed to be reflected in the national approval ratings for the Prime Minster and her party as unemployment figures stayed stubbornly above the three million mark throughout the year.

Added Collins: “Private as well as published polling showed the Conservative party falling badly for much of the year, moving into third place in May behind Labour and the SDP-Liberal Alliance. By August, the position seemed worse still. Approval of the government’s record was at minus 42 per cent. Thatcher’s personal rating was minus 35 per cent and the party remained well adrift of its two main rivals in the Tory party’s private polls.”

The disastrous polling figures may have informed attempts by Thatcher’s press secretary Bernard Ingham to soften her image. Ingham, whose papers are also held by the Churchill Archives Centre, sent a five-page memo to the Prime Minister warning that she had gained a public image as “hectoring, strident and bossy”.

Ingham’s plea to employ a softer rhetoric, including the words ‘compassion’ and ‘caring’, seem to have largely fallen on deaf ears as she shied away from using such language in her party conference speech that year.

Added Collins: “Looking at the document there is no sign of dissent from Thatcher; no scribbled notes or underlining like you often see on her personal files. But she simply would never have worn her heart on her sleeve like that, partly because it would have gone against her instincts, but also because, by that point, it would have seemed inauthentic.”

“Her public image was so fixed that she couldn’t win. If she had suddenly shown a softer side, people would not have believed it.”

Professor Deaton from Princeton University, USA, has received the prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare".

The consumption of goods and services is a fundamental part of people’s welfare. According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Professor Deaton has deepened our understanding of different aspects of consumption. “His research concerns issues of immense importance for human welfare, not least in poor countries. Deaton’s research has greatly influenced both practical policymaking and the scientific community. By emphasizing the links between individual consumption decisions and outcomes for the whole economy, his work has helped transform modern microeconomics, macroeconomics and development economics.”

The Academy site says that Deaton receives this year’s Prize in Economic Sciences for three related achievements: the system for estimating the demand for different goods that he and John Muellbauer developed around 1980; the studies of the link between consumption and income that he conducted around 1990; and the work he has carried out in later decades on measuring living standards and poverty in developing countries with the help of household surveys.

Professor Deaton is Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Economics.

He has previously held appointments at the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge and holds BA, MA and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge. He is author of four books and many journal articles, and has for many years been concerned with understanding individual and household behaviour and its links to well-being. His interests include global and domestic health, as well as economic development, poverty, and inequality. For many years, he has worked on these issues in India.

Professor Sanjeev Goyal, Chair of the Faculty of Economics, commented: "My colleagues and I are delighted to hear of the award of this year's Nobel Prize in Economics to Professor Angus Deaton. Prof Deaton was associated with Fitwilliam College and the Department of Applied Economics (DAE) in Cambridge at the start of his career. The period at the DAE played an important role in shaping the development of his work on the Almost Ideal Demand System, which has been recognised by the Nobel Prize today. Professor Deaton has been a Marshall Lecturer and more recently delivered the Richard Stone Lectures in Cambridge."

The Master of Fitzwilliam College, Nicky Padfield said: "Fitzwilliam College is buzzing with excitement at this news. Professor Deaton’s Foundation Lecture in the College in 2010 rekindled links which go back to his undergraduate days in the College, when he read maths and economics.  He has played many roles in the College - as student, teacher, researcher, Director of Studies and Honorary Fellow.”

Director of Studies in Economics at Fitzwilliam College, Anna Watson, said: “The College is extremely proud that Angus Deaton’s groundbreaking work spanning microeconomics, macroeconomics and development economics has received such extraordinary recognition. We are greatly honoured to have him as one of our alumni and Honorary Fellows. He is an inspiration for our students and for our wider College community.”

He has been a long-time consultant to the World Bank, on poverty measurement, and on the development of international price indexes to allow comparisons of poverty lines across different countries. In 2006, he chaired a panel charged with the evaluation of World Bank research over the previous decade. He has served on National Academy panels on poverty and family assistance, on price and cost-of-living index numbers, and on racial and ethnic differences in health.

In 1978, Professor Deaton was the first recipient of the Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society, and was Editor of Econometrica from 1984–1988.  He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was President of the American Economic Association in 2009.

Fitzwilliam College Foundation Lecture 2010: Professor Angus Deaton speaking at Fitzwilliam College on 9 November 2010

The announcement of the Booker Prize winner (this year on 13 October) is a significant event in the literary world. A panel of judges, headed by a respected literary critic, sifts a list of notable novels from the past year, ultimately crowning one of them Booker Prize winner. But cynics might suspect that the hoopla around the Booker Prize is as much (read: more) to do with publicity than it is to do with literary criticism.

Getting to put ‘Booker Prize Winner’ and, perhaps, a puff from the panel of judges on your dust-jacket is priceless. But can puffing – the practice of lauding a book’s merits in a few words, usually on its jacket blurb – be considered a kind of literary criticism, however cynically regarded it might be?

Initial signs are not encouraging. Even the definition of the ‘puff’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (which of course has its own puff: “the definitive record of the English language”) is implicitly disapproving. The puff is “inflated or unmerited praise or commendation”, “an extravagantly laudatory advertisement or review”, peddled by a “puff purveyor” or “puff merchant” or – surely worst of all – a “PUFF-MASTER GENERAL”. The puff itself doesn’t get good publicity.

As Nicholas Mason has shown in his insightful, informative book Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (there’s a puff for free), when the term ‘puff’ first emerged around the beginning of the 18th century, it referred specifically to “publishers’ attempts to promote their books outside traditional forms of advertising”. As the scornful coinage “PUFF-MASTER GENERAL”, from the satirical 1779 play The Critick Anticipated, suggests, many have failed to be impressed by this way of attempting, well, to impress people.

One way to tarnish the credentials of a literary rival, therefore, is to suggest that his or her literary virtues have been puffed out of all proportion. In its 1848 issue the Western Literary Messenger acidly remarked of the writer, social campaigner, and friend of Edgar Allan Poe, George Lippard, that “the ‘career’ of Geo. Lippard, is an illustration of what well-directed and energetic puffing can do for an author. Without pretensions (or at least, nothing save pretensions) to either style or matter; laughed at by one half the world and pitied by the other; he contrives, by the aid of a few such publications as the Saturday Courier, Flag of Our Union, etc., to foist annually upon the public, some half-dozen volumes of the merest trash and twaddle that ever lumbered the shelves of ‘the Trade’”.

If Lippard is either laughed at or pitied by the whole world, it’s hard to imagine who actually buys and reads his books. In any case, Lippard was unlikely to have told his publicist to mine the Western Literary Messenger for a puff for one of his half-dozen books a year: “George Lippard’s latest book is ‘merest trash and twaddle’ (Western Literary Messenger).”

There are many more examples of scorn for the puff – and not just scorn, either, but the sense that it is genuinely damaging to literary culture. George Orwell, for instance, blamed the “disgusting tripe that is written by blurb-reviewers’ for the fact that ‘the novel is being shouted out of existence”. 

According to Orwell, being puffed up is not even all that agreeable to the puffee: “Nobody likes being told that he has written a palpitating tale of passion which will last as long as the English language; though, of course, it is disappointing not to be told that, because all novelists are being told the same, and to be left out presumably means that your books won't sell.” Orwell concludes: ‘The hack review is in fact a sort of commercial necessity, like the blurb on the dust-jacket, of which it is merely an extension.”

But perhaps it is possible to give a slightly more nuanced view of the practice of puffing – one that doesn’t necessarily see it as “tripe” or “drivel” (Orwell’s words). In the wonderfully titled Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil, his teeming mishmash of travel writings and reflections, Nathaniel Parker Willis ventured a tentative defence of partial (in both senses) praise for literary friends:

“As to literary puffs, we would as soon sell our tears for lemon-drops, as to defile one of God’s truthful adjectives with a price for using it. […] But if we love a man (as we do many, thank God, whom we are called upon to criticise), we pick out the gold that is inlaid in his book, and leave to his enemies to find the brass and tinsel. And if that’s not fair, we don’t very much care—for we scorn to be impartial.”

What Willis, like Orwell, spurns is the commercial aspect of puffing, rejecting the practice of payment for a puff. But Willis does imply that performing the function of critic in relation to the work of one’s friends is not only allowable, but a benefit to the reading public, since it may now see the gold inlaid in the work, discretely separated from the dross that might, in situ, surround it.

The OED’s definition of the ‘puff’ goes on to suggest, in fact, the emergence over time of a more neutral, less loaded understanding of this term. As well as being undeserved, hyperbolic praise, the puff is also simply “a review, comment, etc., regarded as constituting good publicity”. Nevertheless, there remains here a large and outstanding question. Are puffs in any way literary criticism or are they just PR? Much of the discussion around the practice of puffing concerns its impact on sales; whether they influence how a reader then reads the book she or he has bought, nobody seems much to care.

If we look at a couple of the puffs for this year’s Booker shortlist, we might be able to bring this question into focus. The claim of the unnamed reviewer in The Independent that Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread is simply “Glorious” doesn’t seem to get us very far into the realms of literary criticism. Eleanor Catton’s gnomic description of Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen as “awesome in the true sense of the word” is perhaps more critically promising: what is the true sense of ‘awesome’? why does this book in particular evoke that sense?

The answer to the question of whether the puff can be literary criticism depends, of course, on how we define literary criticism. If criticism is, as MH Abrams put it, “the overall term for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analysing, interpreting, and evaluating works of literature”, then puffs don’t qualify since they’re hardly “studies”. If, on the other hand, criticism is just “public communication on literature comprising both description and evaluation”, as Peter Uwe Hohendahl has claimed, then puffs certainly communicate, describe, and evaluate – and do so in public.

Finally deciding this question is no doubt too large a task for this short piece, but for all their implication in commercial imperatives and dubious circuits of mutual celebration, puffs are nevertheless little windows – often smeared and cracked, to be sure – onto the itself deeply imperfect terrain of literary criticism.

Ross Wilson is writing a book tentatively titled Critical Forms: Genres of Criticism from 1750 to the Present. It is about puffs, prefaces, letters, lectures, and all the other forms in which criticism has been written.

Inset images: Abbey Bookshop, Rue de la Parcheminerie (Martin Deutsch); Title page of The Critick Anticipated (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online).

A bewildering and often very frightening experience in some mental illnesses is psychosis – a loss of contact with external reality. This often results in a difficulty in making sense of the world, which can appear threatening, intrusive and confusing. Psychosis is sometimes accompanied by drastic changes in perception, to the extent that people may see, feel, smell and taste things that are not actually there – so-called hallucinations. These hallucinations may be accompanied by beliefs that others find irrational and impossible to comprehend.

In research published today in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of researchers based at Cardiff University and the University of Cambridge explore the idea that hallucinations arise due to an enhancement of our normal tendency to interpret the world around us by making use of prior knowledge and predictions.

In order to make sense of and interact with our physical and social environment, we need appropriate information about the world around us, for example the size or location of a nearby object. However, we have no direct access to this information and are forced to interpret potentially ambiguous and incomplete information from our senses. This challenge is overcome in the brain – for example in our visual system – by combining ambiguous sensory information with our prior knowledge of the environment to generate a robust and unambiguous representation of the world around us. For example, when we enter our living room, we may have little difficulty discerning a fast-moving black shape as the cat, even though the visual input was little more than a blur that rapidly disappeared behind the sofa: the actual sensory input was minimal and our prior knowledge did all the creative work.

“Vision is a constructive process – in other words, our brain makes up the world that we ‘see’,” explains first author Dr Christoph Teufel from the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. “It fills in the blanks, ignoring the things that don’t quite fit, and presents to us an image of the world that has been edited and made to fit with what we expect.”

“Having a predictive brain is very useful – it makes us efficient and adept at creating a coherent picture of an ambiguous and complex world,” adds senior author Professor Paul Fletcher from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. “But it also means that we are not very far away from perceiving things that aren’t actually there, which is the definition of a hallucination.

“In fact, in recent years we’ve come to realise that such altered perceptual experiences are by no means restricted to people with mental illness. They are relatively common, in a milder form, across the entire population. Many of us will have heard or seen things that aren’t there.”

In order to address the question of whether such predictive processes contribute to the emergence of psychosis, the researchers worked with 18 individuals who had been referred to a mental health service run by the NHS Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Foundation Trust, and led by Dr Jesus Perez, one of the co-authors on the study, and who suffered from very early signs of psychosis. They examined how these individuals, as well as a group of 16 healthy volunteers, were able to use predictions in order to make sense of ambiguous, incomplete black and white images, similar to the one shown above.

The volunteers were asked to look at a series of these black and white images, some of which contained a person, and then to say for a given image whether or not it contained a person. Because of the ambiguous nature of the images, the task was very difficult at first. Participants were then shown a series of full colour original images, including those from which the black and white images had been derived: this information could be used to improve the brain’s ability to make sense of the ambiguous image. The researchers reasoned that, since hallucinations may come from a greater tendency to superimpose one’s predictions on the world, people who were prone to hallucinations would be better at using this information because, in this task, such a strategy would be an advantage.

The researchers found a larger performance improvement in people with very early signs of psychosis in comparison to the healthy control group. This suggested that people from the clinical group were indeed relying more strongly on the information that they had been given to make sense of the ambiguous pictures.

When the researchers presented the same task to a larger group of 40 healthy people, they found a continuum in task performance that correlated with the participants’ scores on tests of psychosis-proneness. In other words, the shift in information processing that favours prior knowledge over sensory input during perception can be detected even before the onset of early psychotic symptoms.

“These findings are important because they tell us that the emergence of key symptoms of mental illness can be understood in terms of an altered balance in normal brain functions,” says Naresh Subramaniam from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. “Importantly, they also suggest that these symptoms and experiences do not reflect a ‘broken’ brain but rather one that is striving – in a very natural way – to make sense of incoming data that are ambiguous.”

The study was carried out in collaboration with Dr Veronika Dobler and Professor Ian Goodyer from the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Bernard Wolfe Health Neuroscience Fund. It was carried out within the Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. Additional support for the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge came from the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council.

Reference
Teufel, C et al. Shift towards prior knowledge confers a perceptual advantage in early psychosis and psychosis-prone healthy individuals. PNAS; 12 Oct 2015

As I drive with Parubai to meet the rest of her family in Pune district, I spot in my rear mirror a motorbike following us. I slow down, wondering if it is someone I know. The rider, a man in his mid-30s, signals for me to wait. It’s already close to sunset and Parubai, who is assisting me with my doctoral fieldwork, is a bit nervous as this area is not considered to be the safest, especially for two women on their own.

“Madam, are you looking to buy some land? I can show you a plot road-touch, clear title. Many city people like you have bought land from me,” he assures me in his salesman’s patter. I am amused – till recently, this region was seen as the back of beyond, but now with the real-estate boom, one can see vast stretches of land marked off with barbed wire fences. Through my research with Dr Bhaskar Vira in the Department of Geography, I am trying to understand the impact of this increasing incidence of land sale on a rural society.

When we reach the village, I am surprised to see several expensive cars standing in front of a modern house where one of my other helpers’ hut once stood. I see his wife Alka making rice bhakari– a kind of flatbread – on a traditional wood stove in a small kitchen at the back. She invites me to have a bite.

As I sit with smoke making my eyes water, she gives me updates. Her husband, who belongs to the dominant Maratha caste, has sold large chunks of family land and used the money to buy a car, build this house and organise a lavish marriage ceremony for their daughter. Tonight he is hosting a party for a local politician.

“Money so earned finds a hundred ways to disappear,” says Alka despairingly. During my stay in the villages, I have often heard similar comments. With the escalating land prices, the notion of land as a symbol of status and marker of identity is beginning to change. Disputes over land ownership and increasing disparity among the villagers due to the influx of money through land sale are affecting the social networks adversely.

We retire to Parubai’s house. It’s a total contrast, with its mud walls and tiled roof with gaping holes covered by a plastic sheet. Unlike Alka, she is a landless Katkari, one of the most socio-economically marginalised tribes in India. Her husband herds a few goats to earn a living. It is an open secret that she brews liquor for extra cash.

After a meal of rice and spicy potato curry, I struggle to write my field notes by a small kerosene lamp – there is no electricity in the house – while Manjula, Parubai’s granddaughter, spreads a few sheets on the mud floor for the four of us to sleep on.

Hens kept under a basket in the corner rustle. A drunkard turns up asking for booze. Highly embarrassed, Parubai somehow sends him away. It is getting chilly as the wood stove has died out completely.

A few hours pass, I wake up with a start: the sheets seem wet. I am horrified and hurriedly check the concerned body parts. To my relief all is well. Unable to identify the source, I long for the soft sheets, comfy pillow and cosy duvet back in my Cambridge house. Eventually I creep out. The sky looks like a diamond-studded cloak. It is quiet and peaceful. I go back and wait for the sunrise. 

After the morning tea, I raise the matter of my damp sheet in an attempt to resolve this mystery. “That must be Mini the naughty goat,” says Manjula, as she bursts out laughing. “She enjoys relieving herself on an unsuspecting guest in the middle of the night.” As we embark on a trek to the fields for the morning job, she is still giggling. On the way, we pass a few fenced areas advertising the upcoming holiday home project.

During my fieldwork, I have observed that the physical landscape of a village is beginning to change, with new fences and luxury villas. Money from land sale is opening up new business opportunities such as shops, restaurants, beauty parlours, wedding halls and renting of houses for a few villagers, but at the same time poor people like Parubai are losing the additional income through fodder harvesting as large areas are fenced off. 

When we return, Parubai’s husband is busy getting the goats ready for a grazing trip. I suspect one particular member of the herd giving me a mischievous look. A few metres away, I see the land broker from the previous evening with a man wearing expensive sunglasses. “Very good plot, road-touch, clear title,” I hear him say... 

Girija is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and is also funded through a Fitzwilliam College Environment Studies Fund.

Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz is interested in our fate: not in an existential sense, but rather in the fate of cells at the earliest stages of life. “We look at how cells decide their fate,” she explains. “All of the cells initially look the same, and yet we know that they will go on to make different parts of the body – our hands, our head, the left and right side of our bodies. How do the cells know where to go?”

To read more, including how synchronised swimmers can help us understand embryo development, see the article on Medium.

The Barringer meteor crater is an iconic Arizona landmark, more than 1km wide and 170 metres deep, left behind by a massive 300,000 tonne meteorite that hit Earth 50,000 years ago with a force equivalent to a ten megaton nuclear bomb. The forces unleashed by such an impact are hard to comprehend, but a team of Stanford scientists has recreated the conditions experienced during the first billionths of a second as the meteor struck in order to reveal the effects it had on the rock underneath.

The sandstone rocks of Arizona were, on that day of impact 50,000 years ago, pushed beyond their limits and momentarily – for the first few trillionths and billionths of a second – transformed into a new state. The Stanford scientists, in a study published in the journal Nature Materials, recreated the conditions as the impact shockwave passed through the ground through computer models of half a million atoms of silica. Blasted by fragments of an asteroid that fell to Earth at tens of kilometres a second, the silica quartz crystals in the sandstone rocks would have experienced pressures of hundreds of thousands of atmospheres, and temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius.

What the model reveals is that atoms form an immensely dense structure almost instantaneously as the shock wave hits at more than 7km/s. Within ten trillionths of a second the silica has reached temperatures of around 3,000℃ and pressures of more than half a million atmospheres. Then, within the next billionth of a second, the dense silica crystallises into a very rare mineral called stishovite.

The results are particularly exciting because stishovite is exactly the mineral found in shocked rocks at the Barringer Crater and similar sites across the globe. Indeed, stishovite (named after a Russian high-pressure physics researcher) was first found at the Barringer Crater in 1962. The latest simulations give an insight into the birth of mineral grains in the first moments of meteorite impact.

The size of the crystals that form in the impact event appears to be indicative of the size and nature of the impact. The simulations arrive at crystals of stishovite very similar to the range of sizes actually observed in geological samples of asteroid impacts.

Studying transformations of minerals such as quartz, the commonest mineral of Earth’s continental crust, under such extreme conditions of temperature and pressure is challenging. To measure what happens on such short timescales adds another degree of complexity to the problem.

These computer models point the way forward, and will guide experimentalists in the studies of shock events in the future. In the next few years we can expect to see these computer simulations backed up with further laboratory studies of impact events using the next generation of X-ray instruments, called X-ray free electron lasers, which have the potential to “see” materials transform under the same conditions and on the same sorts of timescales.

Simon Redfern, Professor in Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Inset image: Barringer meteor Crater, Arizona (NASA Earth Observatory).

By Endurance We Conquer: Shackleton and his Men draws on the world’s largest and pre-eminent collection of Shackleton and Endurance artefacts and archives, held in Cambridge, and is the major international exhibition of the centenary celebrations.

Running at Scott Polar Research Institute’s Polar Museum until June 2016, the unique exhibition puts on display many rarely seen objects such as Shackleton’s diaries, and for the first time, letters by Huberht Hudson, the ship’s navigator.

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914-17 set out to cross Antarctica via the South Pole. However, in November 1915, Shackleton and his 28-man crew were confronted with one of the worst disasters in Antarctic history when Endurance was trapped, crushed and sunk by pack ice. The outside world was unaware of their predicament or location, food was scarce and the chance of survival was remote.

The Cambridge exhibition draws together, for the first time in decades, the navigation equipment used by Shackleton and a five-man crew on their remarkable 800-mile open boat journey in the James Caird. The 23ft lifeboat had to battle deadly storms in the Southern Ocean as it sailed to South Georgia to raise the alarm. A replica of the vessel sits outside the Polar Museum – serving as a poignant reminder of the challenges faced as Shackleton sought rescue for his trapped crew.

Alexandra Shackleton, granddaughter of Sir Ernest, said: “This exhibition captures the spirit of Shackleton and his men as they endured unspeakable hardship. Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to explore this extraordinary story of human courage. ”

As well as Shackleton’s technical logs, other archive material on display includes Shackleton’s engraved pannikin (drinking tankard), a memory map drawn by Frank Worsley -showing the route taken during the South Georgia crossing - and the hunting knife belonging to the geologist James Wordie, used to explore the contents of penguin stomachs for gizzard stones that revealed the geology underneath the sea ice.

While the majority of Endurance now sits more than 10,000ft below the sea ice of the Weddell Sea, a tiny handful of remnants of the doomed ship do remain. By far the largest single surviving piece of Endurance (9ft long) is going on display in Cambridge.

The ‘Endurance spar’ was part of Endurance’s mast and brought back from Antarctica by James Wordie where it had been used to build an observation tower to hunt for food. For many years, this last great piece of Shackleton’s ship hung in the Friends room of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge and is on public display for the first time.

SPRI Director Julian Dowdeswell said:  “Shackleton's Endurance expedition and modern polar research share the essential characteristic that only as a team can you operate successfully in the harsh conditions of the Antarctic and Arctic.”

The voices of ordinary people who lived through Angola’s devastating, 27-year civil war have been captured in a damning study that reassesses both how the conflict happened, and the nature of the country’s so-called democracy today.

From 1975 until 2002, hundreds of thousands of Angolans were killed and millions more displaced in a brutal conflict that was described by the United Nations as “the worst war in the world”. By the time it ended, it had become synonymous with child soldiers, human rights atrocities, landmine victims and blood diamond economics.

The bloodshed has usually been seen as the result of ethnic divisions in Angolan society, which mixed with Cold War politics as international powers intervened.

In a new book that draws on extensive interviews with those caught in the crossfire, however, Dr Justin Pearce – a former BBC correspondent in Angola who is now a Research Associate at St John’s College, University of Cambridge – brings the political motivations of Angolans themselves to the centre of the analysis. He reaches a bleak conclusion: This, he suggests, was a war that for most people meant nothing when it started, and then found reasons for existing as it developed, almost as if it were feeding itself.

His study challenges conventional views about why the devastating conflict happened, and considers what it means for Angola today – a supposed democracy which, Pearce says, is for all practical purposes a one-party state.

“We think of most wars as starting with two groups with antagonistic interests,” he said. “Probably the most surprising finding was that this conflict didn’t arise from a broad identity split across Angolan society; it created it. Its end marked the culmination of a process whereby firepower, bloodshed and starvation were employed to transform the possibilities of what Angolans considered imaginable.”

The roots of the Civil War pre-date Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975. Amid abrupt decolonisation, the rival movements that had opposed colonialism began fighting for the right to rule the new state. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) took control in the capital, but the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) contested the power of the MPLA government.

Despite the intervention of Cuba and South Africa, with the support of the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, the resulting struggle was frequently ignored in the West. In the mid-1990s, when the daily casualty rate was higher than in Bosnia, Margaret Anstee, the United Nations’ special representative to Angola called it “the forgotten tragedy”. “Even now it is difficult to lift the veil of silence,” she wrote in 1996. “The argument is that there is no public interest – and apparently no desire to awaken it, either.”

Pearce’s study seeks to fill a gap by examining what motivated ordinary Angolans to participate in  Africa’s worst conflict: did they believe in a cause, it asks, or did they really not have a choice? Focusing on the Central Highlands region, he spoke to many of the country’s poorest people – rural peasants – as well as town dwellers, farmers, soldiers and politicians.

In part, their personal accounts add to what is already known about the war’s horrors. Some gave examples of the extreme tactics with which UNITA and the MPLA sometimes controlled the population – tales of public executions, kidnappings, forced marriages, and even the burning of alleged “witches”.

In addition, however, their accounts show that the ideological divisions associated with the Cold War meant little to ordinary Angolans. Instead, Pearce found that after years of political suppression by the Portuguese, few Angolans were engaged with politics in 1975. As the MPLA and UNITA seized parts of the country, the locals simply accepted their military domination as legitimate political power.

For most, therefore, the war began not for a cause, but as a reality that was imposed upon people. Many of Pearce’s interviewees described their lives under UNITA and the MPLA as if they had been “owned” by the warring factions. “People lost the notion of being independent,” one interviewee told him. “People became possessions.”

The study found that such political affiliations were often fluid. When territories changed hands, “UNITA people” simply became “MPLA people” instead, and vice-versa. In one particularly extreme case, Pearce was told about a train journey in which the passengers switched allegiances at different stations, to avoid being executed by the opposing militias.

That situation made a mockery of attempts by the West during the 1990s to end the war through democratic means. As the war went on, however, the study suggests that it developed its own reasons for existing. Control was founded upon force and fear, but it was maintained by means of persuasion. Both parties created jobs and provided local services. They also used education programmes to strengthen their claims to rule, while cultivating a fear of the adversary.

Gradually, these strategies turned many Angolans into die-hard supporters of either UNITA or the MPLA. Citizens came to depend on their local party for their livelihoods, and came to define their sense of national identity with the fight against the other side.

Pearce suggests that the consequences were disastrous, because this made the conflict a “zero-sum game”, in which one side had to undermine the other’s ability to support its people in order to win. The MPLA government’s counter-insurgency operations, which intensified in the late 1990s, finally achieved peace on this basis – in the process causing widespread starvation, large-scale population displacement and appalling suffering.

Seen through the prism of this bleak recent history, the book argues that 13 years later, Angola’s supposed democracy remains the result of a war that was won through  domination.

Since its end, the MPLA has implemented a reconstruction programme on the back of an oil boom that is now stalling. While Pearce says that this has created “the most disgusting rich-poor gap imaginable”, he also notes that the government still suppresses political opposition using repressive tactics that echo the war itself.

“It goes through the rituals of multi-party democracy, but I would say it’s a strongly authoritarian state with the trappings of a democracy that doesn’t really function,” Pearce added.

“It’s as if the channels simply don’t exist for the expression of an alternative vision. Even now, with the economy suffering from plunging oil prices, all you see are occasional, small, street protests by a few disaffected young people. It’s hard to see how that alone is going to chip away at the edifice of power, and the government’s response has been brutal. Fifteen activists were imprisoned without trial in June this year, and their mothers were beaten by police when they demonstrated for their sons’ release. I fear that there is going to have to be some sort of severe crisis in Angola before things really get better.”

Political Identity And Conflict in Central Angola, 1975-2002, by Justin Pearce, is published by Cambridge University Press. Dr Pearce is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies, and a Research Associate of St John's College.

Inset images: (1) UNITA troops during a handover of their weapons to government monitors at the war's end in 2002; (2) Civilians carry sacks of food flown into Kuito during the humanitarian crisis of 2001; (3) Landmine clearances in Angola, one legacy of the conflict. All images credit Justin Pearce.

A new study of the relationship between ocean currents and climate change has found that they are tightly linked, and that changes in the polar regions can affect the ocean and climate on the opposite side of the world within one to two hundred years, far quicker than previously thought.

The study, by an international team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge, examined how changes in ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean were related to climate conditions in the northern hemisphere during the last ice age, by examining data from ice cores and fossilised plankton shells. It found that variations in ocean currents and abrupt climate events in the North Atlantic region were tightly linked in the past, and that changes in the polar regions affected the ocean circulation and climate on the opposite side of the world.

The researchers determined that as large amounts of fresh water were emptied into the North Atlantic as icebergs broke off the North American and Eurasian ice sheets, the deep and shallow currents in the North Atlantic rapidly slowed down, which led to the formation of sea ice around Greenland and the subsequent cooling of the Northern Hemisphere. It also strongly affected conditions in the South Atlantic within a matter of one to two hundred years. The results, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, show how climate events in the Northern Hemisphere were tightly coupled with changes in the strength of deep ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean, and how that may have affected conditions across the globe.

During the last ice age, which took place from 70,000 to 19,000 years ago, the climate in the Northern Hemisphere toggled back and forth between warm and cold states roughly every 1000 to 6000 years. These events, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events, were first identified in data from Greenland ice cores in the early 1990s, and had far-reaching impacts on the global climate.

The ocean, which covers 70% of the planet, is a huge reservoir of carbon dioxide and heat. It stores about 60 times more carbon than the atmosphere, and can release or take up carbon on both short and long timescales. As changes happen in the polar regions, they are carried around the world by ocean currents, both at the surface and in the deep ocean. These currents are driven by winds, ocean temperature and salinity differences, and are efficient at distributing heat and carbon around the globe. Ocean currents therefore have a strong influence on whether regions of the world are warm (such as Europe) or whether they are not (such as Antarctica) as they modulate the effects of solar radiation. They also influence whether CO2 is stored in the ocean or the atmosphere, which is very important for global climate variability.

“Other studies have shown that the overturning circulation in the Atlantic has faced a slowdown during the last few decades,” said Dr Julia Gottschalk of Cambridge Department of Earth Sciences, the paper's lead author. “The scientific community is only beginning to understand what it would mean for global climate should this trend continue, as predicted by some climate models.”

Analysing new data from marine sediment cores taken from the deep South Atlantic, between the southern tip of South America and the southern tip of Africa, the researchers discovered that during the last ice age, deep ocean currents in the South Atlantic varied essentially in unison with Greenland ice-core temperatures. “This implies that a very rapid transmission process must have operated, that linked rapid climate change around Greenland with the otherwise sluggish deep Atlantic Ocean circulation,” said Gottschalk, who is a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Best estimates of the delay between these two records suggest that the transmission happened within about 100 to 200 years.

Digging through metres of ocean mud from depths of 3,800 metres, the team studied the dissolution of fossil plankton shells that was closely linked to the chemical signature of different water masses. Water masses originating in the North Atlantic are less corrosive than water masses from the South Atlantic.

“Periods of very intense North Atlantic circulation and higher Northern Hemisphere temperatures increased the preservation of microfossils in the sediment cores, whereas those with slower circulation, when the study site was primarily influenced from the south, were linked with decreased carbonate ion concentrations at our core site which led to partial dissolution,” said co-author Dr Luke Skinner, also from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences.

To better understand the physical mechanisms of rapid ocean adjustment, the data was compared with a climate model simulation which covers the same period. “The data of the model simulation was so close to the deep ocean sediment data, that we knew immediately, we were on the right track,” said co-author Dr Laurie Menviel from the University of New South Wales, Australia, who conducted the model simulation.

The timescales of these large-scale adjustments found in the palaeoceanographic data agree extremely well with those predicted by the model. “Waves between layers of different density in the deep ocean are responsible for quickly transmitting signals from North to South. This is a paradigm shift in our understanding of how the ocean works,” said Axel Timmermann, Professor of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii.

Although conditions at the end of the last ice age were very different to those of today, the findings could shed light on how changing conditions in the polar regions may affect ocean currents. However, much more research is needed in this area. The study's findings could help test and improve climate models that are run for both past and future conditions.

The sediment cores were recovered by Dr Claire Waelbroeck and colleagues aboard the French research vessel Marion Dufresne.

The research was supported by the Gates Cambridge Trust, the Natural Environmental Research Council of the UK, the Royal Society, the European Research Council, the Australian Research Council and the National Science Foundation of the United States of America.

Reference:
Gottschalk, J et. al. Abrupt changes in the southern extent of North Atlantic Deep Water during Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Nature Geoscience (2015). DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2558

In 1996 a wildlife photographer working in a remote part of Tasmania noticed a ‘Tassie devil’ (the affectionate name for the Tasmanian devil) with a tumour on its face. He assumed that the animal’s facial disfigurement was a one-off – but within a year he spotted another devil with a similar problem.  He notified the authorities and, as increasing numbers of affected devils were seen, it was established that the animals were suffering from a wave of devastating facial tumours.

Ten years after the first tumour was spotted, scientists revealed that the lesions weren’t ordinary tumours. They were caused by a transmissible cancer – an extremely rare type of disease, in which living cancer cells are physically transmitted between animals. Only three transmissible cancers are known in nature, and these affect dogs, clams and Tasmanian devils respectively. In the case of devils, the cancer cells are thought to be transmitted by biting.

Once they have acquired the cancer, devils usually live just a matter of months. No treatment exists. As the number of sightings of afflicted animals continued to escalate, with the disease moving across the island from east to west, it became clear that the Tasmanian devil was threatened with extinction.

Dr Elizabeth Murchison, a specialist in comparative oncology and genetics at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine, was brought up in Tasmania. The presence of Tasmanian devils – which are the emblem of the Tasmanian state – was part of her rural childhood. Devils are scavengers and, by disposing of dead animals, they provide a useful service as the ‘garbage bins of the bush’.

Murchison studied genetics and biochemistry at the University of Melbourne, and then studied for her PhD in molecular biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York. Her interest in solving the puzzle of the tumours began in 2006 when she came across a roadkill devil with a tumour in a wild area of Tasmania. This confronting finding triggered her desire to understand this strange disease.

Her specialism is cancer genetics; her research focuses on developing an understanding of the evolution of the DNA of transmissible cancer by tracing it backwards in time to track the steps by which a normal cell mutates to become a cancerous one.

In 2012, while working at the Sanger Institute, near Cambridge, Murchison led a collaborative group of scientists using new DNA sequencing technologies to unlock the Tasmanian devil genome, as well as the genome of the devils’ transmissible cancer. This research led to the discovery that the Tasmanian devil cancer probably emerged relatively recently in a single female Tasmanian devil. The cells derived from this cancer have continued to survive by “metastasising” through the Tasmanian devil population.

More recently, Murchison has concentrated on understanding the genetic differences between tumours occurring in different Tasmanian devils. Although tumours in all Tasmanian devils are a “clone”, derived from the same original animal, the cancer lineage has diverged and acquired new mutations during its spread through the devil population.

This work requires close collaboration with many scientists, especially those back in her native Tasmania. She says: “I wake up to emails from the other side of the world, updating me on the progress of field work back in Tasmania.  We skype regularly because working closely together as an interdisciplinary team is the best way to try to understand this disease and help the devils as soon as possible.”

In addition to working on the Tasmanian devil, Murchison’s group studies canine transmissible venereal tumour (CTVT). CTVT is a sexually transmitted genital cancer, spread by the transfer of living cancer cells between dogs. In contrast to the devil cancer, which emerged relatively recently, CTVT probably emerged thousands of years ago. The disease has now spread widely and affects dogs around the world. Murchison’s group has recently sequenced the genome of CTVT, and this work has shed light on the evolution of a unique cancer.

One of the most disquieting aspects of transmissible cancers is the fact that they are, effectively, parasites. Once the devil cancer cells are introduced to a new host by means of a bite, they go undetected by the devil’s immune system and thus flourish, eventually killing the animal. By sequencing samples of DNA taken from the devil cancer from 2003 onwards, Murchison is trying to understand how this cancer evolved and changed with time.  Her research makes a valuable contribution to the potential development of a vaccine or other therapy to protect devils against the disease.

Over the past decade, the Tasmanian authorities have worked hard to safeguard the future of the Tasmanian devil. An ‘insurance’ population of healthy devils has been spread among Australian parks and zoos. Most recently, a colony of unaffected devils has been established on Maria Island, a national park off the coast of eastern Tasmania.

“Research into this devastating disease in Tasmanian devils is starting to illuminate the underlying processes that caused this unusual disease and promoted its transmission. We hope that our research may also help us to understand basic processes that underlie cancer evolution more generally, including in humans. But, of course, we are motivated by the goal that our research will help to protect this unique and iconic marsupial from extinction,” said Murchison.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: U is for an animal used in heraldry since the 15th century and in recipes for anti-poison since the 1700s.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Tasmanian devil with facial tumours (Elizabeth Murchison); Video clips courtesy of the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program , DPIPWE; Tasmanian devil (Joe Le Nevez).

The accuracy and reliability of expert advice is often compromised by “cognitive frailties”, and needs to be interrogated with the same tenacity as research data to avoid weak and ill-informed policy, warn two leading risk analysis and conservation researchers in the journal Nature today. 

While many governments aspire to evidence-based policy, the researchers say the evidence on experts themselves actually shows that they are highly susceptible to “subjective influences” – from individual values and mood, to whether they stand to gain or lose from a decision – and, while highly credible, experts often vastly overestimate their objectivity and the reliability of peers.   

The researchers caution that conventional approaches of informing policy by seeking advice from either well-regarded individuals or assembling expert panels needs to be balanced with methods that alleviate the effects of psychological and motivational bias.

They offer a straightforward framework for improving expert advice, and say that experts should provide and assess evidence on which decisions are made – but not advise decision makers directly, which can skew impartiality.

“We are not advocating replacing evidence with expert judgements, rather we suggest integrating and improving them,” write professors William Sutherland and Mark Burgman from the universities of Cambridge and Melbourne respectively.

“Policy makers use expert evidence as though it were data. So they should treat expert estimates with the same critical rigour that must be applied to data,” they write.

“Experts must be tested, their biases minimised, their accuracy improved, and their estimates validated with independent evidence. Put simply, experts should be held accountable for their opinions.”

Sutherland and Burgman point out that highly regarded experts are routinely shown to be no better than novices at making judgements.

However, several processes have been shown to improve performances across the spectrum, they say, such as ‘horizon scanning’ – identifying all possible changes and threats – and ‘solution scanning’ – listing all possible options, using both experts and evidence, to reduce the risk of overlooking valuable alternatives.

To get better answers from experts, they need better, more structured questions, say the authors. “A seemingly straightforward question, ‘How many diseased animals are there in the area?’ for example, could be interpreted very differently by different people. Does it include those that are infectious and those that have recovered? What about those yet to be identified?” said Sutherland, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

“Structured question formats that extract upper and lower boundaries, degrees of confidence and force consideration of alternative theories are important for shoring against slides into group-think, or individuals getting ascribed greater credibility based on appearance or background,” he said.

When seeking expert advice, all parties must be clear about what they expect of each other, says Burgman, Director of the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis. “Are policy makers expecting estimates of facts, predictions of the outcome of events, or advice on the best course of action?”

“Properly managed, experts can help with estimates and predictions, but providing advice assumes the expert shares the same values and objectives as the decision makers. Experts need to stick to helping provide and assess evidence on which such decisions are made,” he said. 

Sutherland and Burgman have created a framework of eight key ways to improve the advice of experts. These include using groups – not individuals – with diverse, carefully selected members well within their expertise areas.

They also caution against being bullied or “starstruck” by the over-assertive or heavyweight. “People who are less self-assured will seek information from a more diverse range of sources, and age, number of qualifications and years of experience do not explain an expert’s ability to predict future events – a finding that applies in studies from geopolitics to ecology,” said Sutherland.

Added Burgman: “Some experts are much better than others at estimation and prediction. However, the only way to tell a good expert from a poor one is to test them. Qualifications and experience don’t help to tell them apart.”

“The cost of ignoring these techniques – of using experts inexpertly – is less accurate information and so more frequent, and more serious, policy failures,” write the researchers. 

Indian languages have no word for innovation. But India has 
jugaad. It means finding practical solutions, being enterprising with resources, and learning from the principles of flexibility and frugality. Jugaad is bigger than a word. 
It’s a mind-set.

To explain, Professor Jaideep Prabhu, co-author of Frugal Innovation: How to do Better with Less published in 2015, points to a small clay box in the corner of his office. “It’s an ingenious invention! It consumes no electricity, is 100% biodegradable and produces zero waste.”

The MittiCool fridge is the brainchild 
of Mansukh Prajapati, a potter by trade. Water in an upper chamber of the clay box seeps through the walls of a lower chamber, cooling it through evaporation. In a country where 500 million people live without reliable electricity, Prajapati realised that his clay fridge could provide huge health benefits by keeping food cool without the need for electricity and at an affordable price; he trained a local workforce and started mass production. Forbes magazine has since named him among the most influential rural Indian entrepreneurs.

“Emerging markets like India, China, Brazil and Kenya are a breeding ground for ideas like the MittiCool that transform scarcity into opportunity and do more with less,” explains Prabhu, the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business at Cambridge Judge Business School.

“Jugaad innovation is one reason why, despite a scarcity of food, water and energy, and limited healthcare and education, India has one of the fastest growing economies in the world.”

And now, in a world that is increasingly described as ‘VUCA’ – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous – the ‘winds of frugal innovation are blowing west’, as some of the world’s top companies are embracing business models that look for simple solutions and then deliver them quickly and at less cost.

Prabhu explains that it is a need-based, bottom-up approach to innovation that has largely not been seen in Western economies since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. “The more usual pathway today is to channel innovation through large-scale R&D efforts, often with crippling levels of costs, control and time. Take the pharma industry for example: R&D spending rose from $15 billion in 1995 to $45 billion in 2009, yet the number of new drugs launched annually dropped 44%.”

He adds: “Jugaad is gutsy and different. It’s rather like comparing the freedom and improvisation of a jazz band with the set of rules and structures followed in a classical piece of music.”

To research the principles of jugaad, Prabhu and co-authors Navi Radjou and Simone Ahuja spent four years talking to rural entrepreneurs and leading Indian and Western companies. The result was their 2012 book JugaadInnovation– the first ‘recipe’ for how jugaad works and why businesses are adopting its principles in their own innovation programmes.

He gives GE Healthcare as an example. Like other multinationals, GE has set up a large R&D facility in India to tap into India’s massive pool of scientists and engineers at reduced costs. “Although they went there initially for labour arbitrage, what they have stayed for is the potential of the local market, and they are innovating for that market in a jugaad way.”

Realising that access to expensive medical devices like electrocardiography (ECG) machines was a problem for many thousands of people in rural areas, they developed a low-cost machine that could be carried by doctors from the city to the countryside. “The innovation,” explains Prabhu, “was in asking what was the ideal product needed for the purpose, and then reusing off-the-shelf components developed for other applications, in this case bus ticket printers and telephone keypads.

“With the jugaad approach, instead of doing everything yourself, you look around you and see what’s available and  you combine them – you join the dots.” To date, more than 10,000 of these low-cost ECG units have been sold. Being able to act flexibly is key, Prabhu explains. “Ratan Tata, Chairman of Tata Group, conceived of the Nano car as an affordable, safe alternative to the perilous two wheelers that often carry whole families in India. When sales flagged, they had to re-think their marketing and customer financing, and even the formality of their rural showrooms.”

His research in the past three years has charted how what has been the norm for Indian innovators is turning into a global trend as companies across sectors – American Express, Ford, Marks & Spencer and Siemens among them – are becoming part of the frugal innovation revolution.

Marks & Spencer, for instance, unveiled its Plan A 2020 last year (“because there is no plan B”), which set out an environmentally frugal business model to reduce waste, increase energy efficiency and source sustainably.

Post economic crisis, Ford has launched innovation initiatives to become more agile in a future crisis. One of these is a partnership with TechShop that offers access to 3D printers and laser and machine tools – a playground for Ford engineers and members of the public to tinker and bring their ideas to life. Within a year, the tinkerers had helped Ford more than double their output of patentable ideas.

But it’s still early days in the revolution. Prabhu and Radjou, co-authors of Frugal 
Innovation, estimate that around 5% of companies in developed economies are advanced in their frugal innovation journey, 15% have adopted some aspects and 80% have yet to formulate a strategy:  “Implementing a frugal innovation strategy in any organisation can be daunting. There is no magic formula.” Radjou and Prabhu are not suggesting that traditional innovation pathways involving structured and rigorous R&D should be abandoned. They see each approach as complementary and part of an ‘innovation toolkit’ to be used by businesses in developed and emerging markets alike.

“The developed world needs the liveliness and the growth of the emerging markets,” says Prabhu.

On the other hand, says Tata, “Indian business needs to integrate the structured Western R&D model of innovation with their free-flowing 
jugaad model to create a dynamic balance between both approaches in their organisations.”

Prabhu concludes: “It’s symbiotic – one feeds from the other. Jugaad teaches the West to innovate in ways that are different. But equally, emerging markets must learn about what makes the West the West – the technology, the processes.”

“Ultimately, frugal innovation is about people,” says Prabhu. “It is human ingenuity that drives innovation – just like Mansukh Prajapati and his clay fridge – seeking opportunity in adversity, doing more with less, being flexible and simple, and following your heart.”

The campaign for the University and Colleges of Cambridge will focus on the University’s impact on the world. Cambridge will be working with philanthropists to address major global problems.

Through it, major investment has been secured in a programme of research into the causes of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease led by Professor Chris Dobson, Master of St John’s College.

It will feed into the dynamic environment of the Cambridge technology cluster, helping to drive innovation and entrepreneurship. James Dyson is giving to the campaign in support of the next generation of engineers who will lead this effort.

Recent gifts have included a major gift to economics research and teaching from Bill and Weslie Janeway, one from the ALBORADA Trust to support the development of African research capacity in areas such as infectious disease and governance and human rights, and a gift by Dennis and Mireille Gillings to support global public health leadership in partnership with Institut Pasteur.  

5,000 donors have already given to the campaign, many of whom are Cambridge alumni, motivated to give back to their college in recognition of the education they received as students.

Co-Chairs of the campaign are Dr Mohamed A. El-Erian, one of the world’s most successful investors, and Harvey McGrath, Chairman of Big Society Capital. Both Dr El-Erian and Mr McGrath have been closely involved with preparations for the campaign over the last two years.

Dr El-Erian said: “I am delighted to be co-chairing this campaign, and to be signalling my philanthropic commitment to Cambridge. My experience at Cambridge has shaped my entire life since – it has been the main driver of my professional development – and for good reason. Cambridge taught me not just what, but how, to think – as it has done so for countless others for over 800 years.”

Mr McGrath said: “Private capital has a crucial role to play in addressing societal issues. It can enable risk taking and original thought. It can support new approaches to old problems. Nowhere is this truer than at the University of Cambridge, which makes such a major contribution to the world in such a diversity of ways, and I am proud to be co-chairing this campaign.”

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Leszek Borysiewicz, said: “Philanthropy is vital to the future of Cambridge: it underpins our ambition by allowing us the space to innovate, free from the constraints of political and economic change. In addition, I want to see Cambridge rise to the world’s many challenges in energy, food, healthcare, education, and inequality. Philanthropy is uniquely placed to enable the new ways of working and partnerships with NGOs and industry that can see us make a powerful contribution in these critical areas.” 

Dr Mohamed A. El-Erian

The former Chief Executive of PIMCO, one of the world’s largest investment management companies, Dr El-Erian now serves as Chair of President Obama’s Global Development Council, Chief Economic Advisor for Allianz, and writes regularly for Bloomberg, the Financial Times and Project Syndicate. Dr El-Erian is honorary fellow and alumnus of Queens’ College (Economics, 1977).

Mr Harvey McGrath

Mr McGrath is an alumnus of St Catharine’s (Geography, 1971) and is now Chairman of Big Society Capital. He is Chairman of a number of charities, including Heart of the City and the Prince’s Teaching Institute, and is a trustee of New Philanthropy Capital, and the Mayor’s Fund for London. He is a member of the Guild of Cambridge Benefactors and was awarded The Chancellor’s 800th Anniversary Medal for Outstanding Philanthropy in June 2012.