Root Privileges

Science

artificial intelligence Bharatiya Janata Party blogging CERN Chandrayaan 2 climate change Covaxin COVID-19 COVID-19 pandemic Donald Trump Elon Musk Facebook fantasy fiction Gaganyaan Higgs boson India-based Neutrino Observatory Indian Council of Medical Research Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO journalism K Sivan Large Hadron Collider NASA nationalism Nobel Prizes novel coronavirus Open Access particle physics peer review Prime Minister Narendra Modi pseudoscience Quantum mechanics Science science communication science fiction science journalism science writing scientific publishing scientific research scientism social media SpaceX The Hindu The Wire Twitter

  • Disappointing persons of the year 2021

    I’m starting to think that in this day and age, you will but err when you pick individuals for traditionally ‘prestigious’ awards, prizes, recognitions, etc., probably because the sort of people who can stand out by themselves have to have had the sort of clout and power that typically comes not through personal achievement as much as systemic prejudice – or they need to have screwed up on a magnitude so large that the nature of their action must overlap significantly with a combination of centralised power and lack of accountability. And on the spectrum of possibilities between these two extremes lie The Week‘s and Time‘s persons of the year 2021.

    The Week has picked – wait for it – Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) director-general Balram Bhargava for his leadership of India’s medical response to the country’s COVID-19 crises. I doubt I’d lose my journalistic equipoise if I said he deserved to be the “clown of the year” not just because Bhargava, and ICMR with him, has made many batty claims throughout the epidemic – principally in press conferences – but also because, to echo the recent words of Barton Gellman, he has pushed an independent medical research body outside the democratic system and into the prime minister’s office.

    Yet The Week‘s article justifying its choice makes no mention of these transgressions and sticks only to Bhargava making life-impacting decisions at 3 am – like tens of thousands of healthcare workers around the country, who did that and kept their collective spine – and a can-do attitude in which The Week fails to see that “getting things done” to the appreciation of your colleagues also means that unless someone takes more initiative than they’re expected to, the organisation is systematically incapable of going “over and beyond”, so to speak. One way or another, it’s not hard to conclude that Bhargava will leave ICMR worse than it was when he joined.

    Time‘s person of the year 2021 is Elon Musk. Its profile reads much less like the profilee is doing the profiler a favour, but it also fails to overcome the suspicion that it expects the sheer magnitude of Musk’s ambitions for the world to absolve him of his failures – failures that appear like minor glitches in a grand, technocratic future-vision to Silicon Valley and Wall Street honchos (and their mimics worldwide) but to anyone else suggest something worse but also familiar: a plutocracy in which each billionaire is only looking out for himself, or at best his company’s interests.

    Time‘s profile is essentially a paean to the extent to which Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX companies have reinvigorated their respective industries (automotives and spaceflight) through innovations in manufacturing and industrial management, but it’s often presented in a context-limited, value-neutral fashion that prompts concerns that the magazine wouldn’t have had access to Musk if it didn’t promise to write nice things about him.

    For example, Time writes that “Musk’s … announcement of a $100 million climate prize rankled some environmentalists because of its inclusion of proposals for direct-air carbon capture,” and that its sole criticism is that this tech doesn’t work. But the greater issue is that focusing on carbon capture and storage technologies is a technofix that allows Tesla and other vehicle-makers to evade responsibility to reduce the demand for carbon, and that Musk’s ‘challenge’ is really a bid through philanthrocapitlism to prolong ‘business as usual’ climate scenarios. For another related example, about Tesla’s success with electric vehicles, the profile says:

    That has made Musk arguably the biggest private contributor to the fight against climate change. Had the 800,000 Teslas sold in the last year been gas-powered cars, they would have emitted more than 40 million metric tons of CO₂ over their lifetimes—equivalent to the annual emissions of Finland. But EVs may ultimately be less important to the climate fight than the central innovation that made them possible: batteries. Tesla has repurposed the lightweight, energy-dense cells that power its cars for huge grid-scale batteries that provide essential backup for renewables. Demand for Tesla’s smaller home-based Powerwall, which can store electricity from rooftop solar systems, has spiked as consumers look for alternatives to the grid, driven by everything from February’s Texas power shortage to the fire risk in California that has led to power shutoffs.

    Yet the profile doesn’t mention that even when electrified, more and more people owning cars only exacerbates the underlying problem – the demand for electricity, from a climate mitigation standpoint, and urban traffic and congestion – and that we need cities to shift to more affordable, usable and efficient modes of public transport. (The profile also and obviously doesn’t include Musk’s comment in 2017 that he dislikes public transport because he grossly mistrusts other people.) And if Tesla’s technologies will ultimately benefit the US’s, and the world’s, public transport systems, it’s hard to imagine the extent to which they would’ve also undermined our fight for climate and social justice by then.

    Instead, this is profiteering, plain and simple, and Time‘s failure to see it as such – throughout the profile, not just in this instance, it repeatedly tries to reflect the world’s aspirations in his own – seems to me to be a symptom of a desire to coexist with Musk more than anything else. Once in a while the profile has a few paragraphs of complaints against Musk and his businesses, only for them to be followed by an excuse for his behaviour or an indication that he was sanctioned appropriately for it, and never anything that goes far enough to contemplate what Musk’s politics might be. “Something about our upbringing makes us constantly want to be on the edge,” Elon’s brother Kimbal says – in the same paragraph that makes the profile’s sole meaningful allusion to the centrality of lucrative NASA contracts to SpaceX’s success. That, to me, said enough.

    I wish both The Week and Time had picked persons of the year who make the world fairer and better in spite of the people they’ve actually picked – but at the same time must conclude that perhaps this is one more tradition whose time has ended.

    Featured image credits: ICMR/Facebook and Steve Jurvetson/Flickr.

  • The omicron variant and scicomm

    Somewhere between the middle of India’s second major COVID-19 outbreak in March-May this year and today, a lot of us appear to have lost sight of a fact that was central to our understanding of COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020: that the only way a disease outbreak, especially of the novel coronavirus, can be truly devastating is if the virus collaborated with poor public health infrastructure and subpar state response. (Similarly, even a variant deemed mild in, say, the UK could lead to disaster in Chennai.) The virus alone doesn’t lead to catastrophic outcomes.

    Just as India’s second outbreak was picking up speed, there was a considerable awareness that the delta variant was wreaking as much havoc as we were letting it. In fact, the Indian government was more than letting it. But since the outbreak began to subside in kurtotic fashion and, much later, as the omicron variant appeared on the scene, the focus on the latter has appeared to overwhelm – at least in public discourse – the extent to which we’re prepared (or not) to face it. Put another way, the focus on the omicron variant and the contexts in which it has been discussed have remained far too scientific. I’m not saying that it should become less scientific but that the social should start finding mention more.

    I realise that everyone is weary of the pandemic and would like if it ended already, and together with the fact that most people in India’s cities have received their two doses of some COVID-19 vaccine, it might seem to everyone that there’s sufficient ground to persist with the idea that the omicron variant couldn’t possibly be devastating, and that we can all return to some kind of normal soon. Now, this is one kind of fatigue. There appears to be a second kind also, based on the fact that the delta variant was the first “major” variant, in a manner of speaking, and the way we talked about it and acted in its potential (and menacing) presence co-evolved with its dispersal through the population.

    The omicron variant, on the other hand, affords both scientists and science communicators the option to simply refer to the narratives and discourses we developed with the delta variant, simply updated to match what we’re finding out about omicron. And this, not surprisingly, has led to a bit of laziness as well. The form I find most lazy, and most annoying, is some scientists’ insistence on pointing to graphs of the number of cases over time in different countries and saying, “If this doesn’t shake us out of our slumber, what will?”

    This is scientism, pure and simple, even if it’s not on the nose: pointing to case trends alone isn’t going to solve anything, especially not in the face of the sort of significant, demographic-wide yearning for a ‘new normal’, or in fact any kind of normal, instead of more and more upheavals. In fact, consider the fact that for most of 2020, most poor people in India believed that if the novel coronavirus had an infection fatality rate of just 1%, it was no big whoop, and that they would continue going to work and eke out a living. Let’s be clear, this is perfectly reasonable. The idea of letting the virus take its course through the population went sideways in Sweden, but in India, if something has a 1% chance of getting you really sick – or even killing you – it’s tragically the case that it quickly falls down a long list of threats, most of which are often much more lethal, beginning, in too many parts of the country, with breathing the air around you or drinking the water that’s available to you.

    To repeat in this context exhortations based solely on graphs printed in English and shared on Twitter that rapidly rising case-loads elsewhere on the planet should suffice to nudge us out of the Indian subcontinent’s collective torpor is a deference to facts that, I’m very tempted to say, understand only 1% of what is going on. Even if these exhortations are directed at state leaders and government officials, they are really misdirected: as I have written before in the context of Anthony Fauci’s senseless interview responses, if the government hasn’t done something that’s obvious to everyone, the reason just can’t be that it hasn’t seen the chart or the numbers you’ve seen to reach your conclusions. The only way such statements could make some sense is if they are intended to galvanise public opinion, but even then, I’m not convinced.

    And seeing these scientists do what they do strikes me that just as much as we’d like to encourage scientists to communicate science as often as is possible, there may be virtue in casting science communication as much in terms of what it does as what it doesn’t. For example, as the number of cases due to the omicron variant of the novel coronavirus is increasing in different parts of the world, socially responsible science communication requires us to not stop at pointing at graphs but to continue to reflect on and articulate how much – or how little – the greater transmissibility of the variant means in and of itself. And in my view, not doing this would just be socially anti-responsible communication: sticking to the science, and accomplishing little overall.

  • The vaccine that was built from scratch

    I have no plans to read ICMR chief Balram Bhargava’s new book, Going Viral, about the “inside story” of Covaxin’s making, and am grateful for that reason for Dr Jammi Nagaraj Rao’s quick but seemingly thorough review in The Wire Science. My lack of interest in the book itself also means I’m going to take those bits from the book quoted in Rao’s review literally, in no need of additional context (a reasonable assumption given the rest of the review and Bhargava’s now-tattered reputation). With this preamble: reading Rao’s review brought three things to mind.

    First, is the Indian clinical research establishment aware of the catch-22 inherent to defending its decisions regarding Covaxin over and over in the public domain? Of the two major COVID-19 vaccines in use in India, Covishield hasn’t prompted even a tenth of the amount of defending (say, by number of words or inches in newspaper columns) Covaxin has seemed to need to maintain its reputation – even when there were multiple news reports in February and March to suggest Covishield may be associated with most vaccine-associated severe adverse events at the time.

    Then again, the establishment will say – as it has said so far – that Covaxin has required defending because you were bent on attacking it for no good reason. And with Bhargava continuing to deflect criticism in his book, this circus will only continue. However, while both us critics and the establishment can keep going, as if our energies were conserved, the catch-22 is that Covaxin’s reputation is not: the longer the circus goes on, the more it will decline.

    Second, the Indian government has progressively invaded multiple public institutions and yoked their machineries to the ruling party’s electoral agenda. Perhaps the most ‘notable’ was the fall of the Election Commission, which, in a recent example, drafted the dates for West Bengal’s assembly poll phases to the BJP’s convenience. But Balram Bhargava’s new book seems to be a new frontier: Rao’s review indicates that Going Viral is one large advertisement for the Indian government, and for the BJP by extension. It’s a new frontier because it’s a book, and it’s a book by the head of a public institution that the government has already invaded. Put another way, there may be nothing Bhargava can say or do as the ICMR chief – including write a book – that we can assume will have any distance between himself and the party itself. (Once he’s done as ICMR chief, of course, the party is likely to offer him a cushy posting in some low-intensity government position.)

    Now, it is tempting to consider that by guiding the composition of a whole book and stamping some pandering functionary’s name on the cover, the BJP is also attempting to invade the space of books as an expression of intellectual achievement, of the sort that the current government has liked to associate with its fiercer critics.

    Third, there is a curious line in Rao’s review that may provide the fort of insight into Covaxin’s development that no government official (at least of this government) will ever admit. Rao writes that the book

    … is not a detailed exposition of the science behind vaccine development in general or Covaxin’s development in particular. There is a retelling of the well-known Edward Jenner story, and some interesting details about why Bharat Biotech was uniquely placed to develop Covaxin: mainly that it operated BSL-3 facilities and had a track record of developing vaccines from scratch.

    One reason the BJP, essentially Prime Minister Narendra Modi, blessed Bharat Biotech was that it could develop vaccines from ‘scratch’? Why should this matter during a pandemic with billions of people around the planet desperately looking for an affordable and good-quality vaccine – except the power that the words “homegrown” and “Made in India” carry for the party, and the government? Neither I nor others can offer dispositive proof that this is what Prime Minister Modi was thinking when he toured Bharat Biotech’s and Serum Institute’s facilities in November last year; the closest we can come is the way in which the party-government combine micromanaged every aspect of Covaxin – down to its ridiculous approval on January 3, 2021, in “clinical trial mode”.

    This façade of self-sufficiency is just that, as two counter-examples can show. First, let me quote from Rao’s review:

    … in his zeal to characterise Covaxin as a ‘completely indigenous vaccine, an epitome of Atmanirbhar Bharat’, Bhargava overlooks the fact that the thing that made Covaxin appropriately immunogenic was the inspired use of an adjuvant called Alhydroxyquim-II, under license from an American research company named Virovax. The licensing arrangement between Virovax, funded by the US National Institute of Health, and Bharat Biotech dates to before the pandemic, in 2019, in a collaboration set up at a meeting organised by the Indo-US Vaccine Action Program. The terms were later extended to include Covaxin.

    Second, there’s a twisted irony in insisting on building a vaccine from scratch at home (because that is politically advantageous) instead of equally supporting both vaccine development and license-based vaccine-manufacturing, then dragging your feet on licensing a vaccine when you do have one to public-sector manufacturers within the country (much less anyone else), while demanding in international fora that vaccine-makers abroad and their respective governments be okay with waiving IP rights to broaden manufacturing.

  • Is mathematics real?

    I didn’t think to think about the realism of mathematics until I got to high school, and encountered quantum mechanics.

    Mathematics was at first just another subject, before becoming a tool with which to think intelligently about money and, later, with advanced statistical concepts in the picture, to understand the properties of groups of objects that couldn’t be deduced from those of individual ones. But by this time, mathematics – taken here to mean the systematic manipulation of numbers according to a fixed and rigid system of rules – seemed to be a world unto its own, separated cleanly from our physical reality akin to the way “a map is not the territory”.

    Put another and limited way, mathematics seemed to me to be a post facto system of rationalisation that people used to understand forces and outcomes whose physical forms weren’t available for direct observation (through one, some or all of the human senses). For example, (a + b)2 = a2 + b2 + 2ab. To what does this translate in the real world? Perhaps I had 10 rupees in one pocket and 20 rupees in the other, and 29 other people turn up with the same combination of funds in their pockets. We could use this formula to quickly calculate the total amount of money there is in all of our pockets. But other than finding application of this sort, I didn’t think the formulae could have any other purpose – and that, certainly, knowing the formula wouldn’t allow us to predict anything new about the world (ergo post facto).

    I was constantly on the cusp of concluding mathematics was made up, a contrivance fashioned to fit our observations, and not real. But in high school, I came upon a form of mathematics-based reasoning that suggested I should think about it differently, if only for the sake of my own productivity. In class XI, my physics teacher at school introduced Wolfgang Pauli’s exclusion principle.

    The principle itself is simple, at least at the outset. Every particle has a fixed set of quantum numbers. An electron in an atom, for example, has four quantum numbers. Each quantum number can take a range of discrete values. A particular combination of the numbers is called a quantum state (i.e. the combination confers the particle with some possibilities and impossibilities). The principle is that no two particles in the same system can occupy the same quantum state.

    Now, it is Pauli’s principle – a logical relationship between various facts – that animates the idea, and not any mathematical rule or prescription. At the same time, the principle itself is arrived at by solving mathematical problems. Why do electrons in atoms have four quantum numbers? Because historically we started off with one, because we perceived the need for one, and over time we added a second, then a third and finally a fourth – all based on experiments in which the electrons behaved in a certain way, but because direct physical observation was out of the question we invented mathematical relationships between the particles’ parameters in different contexts and ascribed meaning to them.

    It was still ‘only’ empirical: scientists tried different things and those that worked stuck. There may be another way to make sense of the particles’ behaviour with, say, five dim sum (🥟) numbers, and reorganise the rest of quantum mechanics to fit in this paradigm. Even then, only the mathematical features of the topic will have changed – the physical features, or more broadly the specific ways in which particles are real, will have not. But this view of mine changed when I read about experiments that proved Pauli’s principle was real. A mathematical system we set up eventually led to the creation of a fixed set (not more, not less) of quantum numbers, and which Wolfgang Pauli eventually combined into a common principle. If scientists had proved that the principle was true and therefore real, could the mathematics undergirding the principle be true and real as well?

    Not all fundamental particles obey Pauli’s exclusion principle. The four quantum numbers of an electron in an atom are: principal (n), azimuthal (l), magnetic (ml) and spin (s). Of these, the spin quantum number can take two kinds of values: half-integer (1/2, 3/2, …) and integer (0, 1, 2, …). Particles with half-integer spin are called fermions, and the rules describing their behaviour are defined by Fermi-Dirac statistics. They obey Pauli’s exclusion principle. Particles with integer spin are called bosons, and the rules describing their behaviour are defined by Bose-Einstein statistics. They don’t obey Pauli’s exclusion principle.

    When some kinds of heavy stars can no longer continue fusion reactions outside their core, they collapse into a neutron star – an ultra-dense ball of neutrons. Neutrons are fermionic particles – they have half-integer spin – which means they obey Pauli’s exclusion principle, and can’t occupy common quantum states. So the neutrons in a neutron star are tightly packed against each other. Their combined mass generates gravity that tries to pull them even closer together – but at the same time Pauli’s exclusion principle forces them to stay apart and remain stuck in their existing quantum states, creating a counter-force called neutron degeneracy pressure.

    We wouldn’t have neutron stars, or electronic goods or even heavy elements in the periodic table, if Pauli’s exclusion principle didn’t exist.

    Most recently, three separate groups of scientists described a new physical manifestation of the principle, called Pauli blocking. Most atoms are fermions (as a whole); each group first created a gas of such atoms and cooled them to a very low temperature – to ensure that in each gaseous system, all of the lowest available quantum states were occupied. (The higher a particle’s quantum state, the more energy it has.)

    A group at JILA, in Colorado, used strontium-87 atoms. A group from the University of Otago, New Zealand, used potassium-40 atoms. And a group from MIT used lithium-6 atoms. (The last one includes Wolfgang Ketterle, whose work I have discussed before).

    Usually, when a photon and an electron collide, the photon is scattered off into a different direction while the atom absorbs some of the photon’s energy and recoils. The absorbed energy forces the atom into a higher quantum state, with a different combination of the quantum numbers than the one it had before the collision. In an ultra-cold fermionic gas in which the particles have occupied the lowest available quantum states, and are packed tightly together as if in a solid, there is no room for any atom to absorb a small amount of energy imparted by a photon because all of the ‘nearby’ quantum states are taken. So the atoms allow the photons to sail right through, and the gas appears to be transparent.

    This barrier, in the form of the atoms being ‘blocked’ from scattering the photons, is called Pauli blocking. And in the three experiments, its effects were directly observable, without their validity having to be mediated through the use of mathematics.

    My views in high school and through college being what they were, I don’t have any serious position on the matter of whether mathematics is real. In fact, my reasoning could have been flawed in ways that I’m yet to realise but which a philosopher who has seriously studied this question may consider trivial. (Update, December 10, 2024: More than three years later, I can think of one. Both the theoretical description of X and the experimental verification of X — where X is any phenomenon grounded in the exclusion principle, e.g. neutron degeneracy pressure, Pauli blocking, etc. — are founded on a mathematical description of a physical reality, i.e. neither activity/event directly accesses the physical condition of X but deals only with the way we’ve chosen to describe such activity/event mathematically, and thus it’s no surprise that the experimental verification of X holds up the mathematical description of X.)

    This said, having to work my way through different concepts in high-energy, astroparticle and condensed-matter physics (as a science communicator) has forced me to accept not anything about mathematics as much as the importance we place on the distinction between something being real versus non-real, and the consequences of that on what mathematics is and isn’t allowed to tell us about the real world. Ultimately, dwelling on the distinction and its consequences distracted from what I found to be the most worthwhile part of discovery: the discovery itself. Even this post was motivated by an article in Physics World about the three experiments, whose second paragraph (and in fact most of whose second paragraphs) focused on potential, far-in-the-future applications of cold fermionic gases displaying Pauli blocking. I don’t care, and I think that from time to time, no one should.

  • The toxic affair between Covaxin and The Lancet

    That Covaxin has been leading a ceaselessly beleaguered life is no mystery – but The Lancet journal may not know that it has been pressed into the questionable service of saving the vaccine’s reputation on at least three occasions. In the latest one, for example, Bharat Biotech, some clueless media outlets and their hordes of followers, assisted ably by the aptly named bhakts of India’s ruling party, have been hollering from rooftops high and low that The Lancet ‘has said’ Covaxin is 77.8% efficacious. Background: The Lancet medical journal has published the paper describing Covaxin’s phase 3 trial results. But to Covaxin’s misfortune, these people appear to be assuming, as they have many times before, that a journal publishing a paper is by all means synonymous to the journal itself speaking for, even endorsing, the paper’s contents.

    If you didn’t know better, you’d think The Lancet had pooled together all the evidence, comments and documents pertaining to Covaxin and pronounced its own verdict about the shot’s reputation. But because you know better, you know that a journal’s editors, and peer-reviewers if they were involved, only checked if the submitted paper’s data is consistent with the submitted paper’s statements and conclusions, and that it was free of research misconduct (although I’m wholly pessimistic about the latter).

    The problem is that the number of people who know better appears to be vanishingly small – so small, in fact, that it didn’t strike me until earlier this year that both clinical trials and scientific publishing involve the sort of specialised education that most people, including (seemingly) all engineers and exponents of many other fields of science, peeled away from many decades ago (depending on how old they are). Even what constitutes publishing or the qualitative differences between good and great papers varies from one specialisation to the next.

    As a result, when Bharat Biotech’s people cheer that The Lancet has ‘held up’ their findings, there’s both very few people to call out their bullshit – the journal published their paper, and didn’t wave a flag for them – and they’re met more often than you’d think with resistance from both Bharat Biotech’s and other scientists, typically because of vested interests. In fact, vested interest, singular: by publishing a paper in a journal, many scientists seek to partake of the journal’s prestige. Call this a nuanced take, but it has significant real-world effects, as we’re seeing with the strange but certainly myopic ways in which Bharat Biotech has sought to defend Covaxin (including, in the latest instance, by undermining the WHO’s approval for it).

    Of course, The Lancet itself, together with some other journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and Cell, has actively cultivated this notion of ‘prestige’ to pad its pockets as well as to passively silence questions about the many problematic papers it has published. Journals engaging in such practices together with the scientists who fall for them have thus contributed in a significant way to the idea that ‘prestige journals’ are in effect ‘prestige conferrers’, so perhaps The Lancet deserves its fate. But the many less- or entirely ill-informed people out there don’t, especially when they start to believe, “The Lancet has said Covaxin is safe, so it must be safe.”

    Medical journals, including The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, have expressed opposition to the idea of releasing medical research papers as preprints, contending that unlike potentially incomplete papers on other topics, the ones they receive could cost lives if they’re published without independent checks first. An entirely reasonable argument. So what happens when The Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine publish good papers about a vaccine that’s flawed in other ways, and whose authors then piggyback on the journals’ self-proclaimed superiority to toot their own horns, even as the journals all know that they’ve only checked the papers, not anything else? Apart from all the other problems with the notion of a journal’s isolated excellence, it’s ridiculous that journals accrue it the same way they’ve been accruing their profits: with no socially meaningful contribution of their own.

  • 60 years of ‘Tsar Bomba’, history’s most powerful nuke

    This post was originally published on October 31, 2018. I republished it once in 2020 after Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy corporation, released 40 minutes of previously classified footage of RDS-220’s explosion on August 28, 2020 (embedded below). Watch this minute-long excerpt by Reuters of the explosion. I’m republishing it again, today, following the publication of a new report that examines the US’s reaction to the bomb.

    Fifty-seven years ago, on October 30, 1961, the Soviets detonated the most powerful nuclear weapon in the history of nukes. The device was called the RDS-220 by the Soviet Union and nicknamed Tsar Bomba – ‘King of Bombs’ – by the US. It had a blast yield of 50 megatonnes (MT) of TNT, making it 1,500-times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined.

    The detonation was conducted off the island of Novaya Zemlya, four km above ground. The Soviets had built the bomb to one-up the US and followed Nikita Khrushchev’s challenge on the floor of the UN General Assembly a year earlier, promising to teach the US a lesson. The B41 nuke used by the US in the early 1960s had a yield of half as much.

    But despite its intimidating features and the political context, the RDS-220 yielded one of the cleanest nuclear explosions ever – and was never tested again. The Soviets had originally intended for the RDS-220 to have a yield equivalent to 100 MT of TNT, but decided against it for two reasons.

    First: it was a three-stage nuke, weighed 27 tonnes and was only a little smaller than a school bus – too big to be delivered using an intercontinental ballistic missile. Maj. Andrei Durnovtsev, a decorated soldier in the Soviet Air Force, modified a Tu-95V bomber to carry the bomb and also flew it on the day of the test.

    The bomb had been fit with a parachute (whose manufacture disrupted the domestic nylon hosiery industry) so that between releasing the bomb and its detonation, the Tu-95V would have enough time to fly 45 km away from the test site. But even then, the bomb’s 100 MT yield would have meant Durnovtsev and his crew would have nearly certainly been killed.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbC7BxXtOlo

    To improve their chances of survival to 50%, engineers reduced the yield from 100 MT to 50 MT – by replacing a uranium-238 tamper around the bomb with a lead tamper.

    In a nuclear weapon, the material undergoing fission or fusion is typically surrounded by a layer called a tamper that serves two functions: keep the material from expanding due to the heat of fission/fusion so that it stays supercritical for longer, and to reflect neutrons emitted during fission/fusion back to increase the energy output.

    But Tsar Bomba’s design was more complicated: the first stage nuclear fission reaction set off a second stage nuclear fusion reaction, which then set off a bigger fusion reaction in the third stage. The original design included a uranium-238 tamper on the second and third stages, such that fast neutrons emitted by the fusion reaction would have kicked off a series of fission reactions accompanying the two stages. Utter madness. The engineers switched the uranium-238 tamper and put in a lead-208 tamper. Lead-208 can’t be fissioned in a chain reaction and as such has a remarkably low efficiency as a nuclear fuel.

    The second reason the RDS-220’s yield was reduced pre-test was because of the radioactive fallout. Nuclear fusion is much cleaner than nuclear fission as a process (although there are important caveats for fusion-based power generation). If the RDS-220 had gone ahead with the uranium-238 tamper on the second and third stages, then its total radioactive fallout would have accounted for fully one quarter of all the radioactive fallout from all nuclear tests in history, raining down over Soviet Union territory. The modification resulting in 97% of the bomb’s yield being in the form of emissions from fusion alone.

    One of the more important people who worked on the bomb was Andrei Sakharov, a noted nuclear physicist and later dissident from the Soviet Union. Sakharov is given credit for developing a practicable design for the thermonuclear weapon – an explosive that could take advantage of the fusion of hydrogen atoms. In 1955, the Soviets, thanks to Sakharov’s work, won the race to detonate a hydrogen bomb that had been dropped from an airplane; until then the Americans had detonated hydrogen charges placed on the ground.

    It was after the RDS-220 test in 1961 that Sakharov began speaking out against nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race (one bomb didn’t change his mind, to be clear). He would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. One of his important contributions to the peaceful use of nuclear power was the tokamak, a reactor design he developed with Igor Tamm to conduct controlled nuclear fusion and generate electric power. The ITER experiment uses this design.

    The reason Tsar Bomba or any weapon like it, with a yield in excess of 50 MT of TNT, was never tested again was the Limited Test Ban Treaty, signed two years after the Soviets tested the weapon. In a new study of historical records, nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein has reported that while then US President John F. Kennedy responded outwardly by minimising the bomb’s importance, closed-door discussions among government officials, including Kennedy himself, suggest that the bomb had much more of an impact on American thinking than they cared to admit.

    Wellerstein’s report is long and full of new details about many aspects of Tsar Bomba. (Its lead image offers a view of the test explosion from Maj. Durnovtsev’s Tu-95V.) Look out for Arzamas-16 (the ‘closed city’ that was the Soviet Union’s first nuclear research and production centre), Project 49, the engineers Yuri Trutnev and Yuri Babaev, Edward Teller’s plans and the weapon-concept known as RIPPLE. It’s also interesting how the physics of the bomb itself began to have a say what the US government could, and couldn’t, do next.

    For example, the American military establishment wanted to respond to the Tsar Bomba test with a bigger detonation of their own (of course). Defence secretary Robert McNamara told Atomic Energy Commission chairman Glenn Seaborg, and Seaborg subsequently relayed to the upper echelons, that this could be in the form of a scaled up Mark 41 with a possible maximum yield of 65 MT. But at 5.8 feet wide, 25.4 feet long and weighing 15.8 tonnes, it would just about fit in the bomb bay of the B-52, a.k.a. the “Stratofortress”, and would require five years to make. That was too far away in the future.

    For another, and much earlier in the narrative, a Soviet weapons scientist named Leonid Feoktistov, belonging to Chelyabinsk-70 – a rival establishment of Arzamas-16 – expresses disappointment that the Tsar Bomba represented not a new frontier of weapons so much as ‘just’ a bigger version of weapons that already existed. Trutnev and others disagreed with this assessment, saying that scaling up a multi-stage nuclear reaction wouldn’t guarantee success and that, in their words, “many things could have happened, including a failure to achieve the desired explosive yield” of 100 MT.

    The contention is fair, but to my mind Feoktistov’s argument also seems directly connected to what Robert McNamara would later tell US Congress: that there wasn’t much to be gained in terms of the science itself by detonating weapons of even higher yield.

    Indeed, Wellerstein delves into the immediate political, diplomatic and military response to the Tsar Bomba test to conclude, with good reason, that the US was left with two mutually exclusive choices: start a programme to build bigger, badder nukes or double down on and ratify the Limited Test Ban Treaty (‘limited’ because it wouldn’t prevent underground testing, which was strictly for low-yield weapons because of the need to fully contain the fireball).

    Secretary of Defense McNamara would be called before Congress to defend the military implications of the treaty before they ratified it. He was emphatically in favor of it—the only area where the United States was not ahead of the Soviets in testing was “very high-yield” weapons, but he now argued that the United States had “no great interest” in those. It was a return to the public rhetoric that had proliferated after the first announcement of a 100-megaton test by the Soviets: Such weapons were wasteful and ridiculous. Lower-yield weapons, which were still quite powerful (a megaton or two is nothing to sniff at!), could be even more destructive if deployed in quantity. The security gained from a treaty that would not only reduce global fallout but would also guarantee a trend toward lower yields, would be worth anything that could be gained from multi-megaton tests.

    But neither the US nor the Soviet Union, but especially the US, entered the treaty blind. The US inserted a “readiness” clause, which meant that it would stay ready to resume above-ground tests if the USSR violated the treaty. This was deemed necessary because the two power blocs had agreed to a ‘Test Ban Moratorium’ in 1959 that Nikita Khrushchev violated in 1961 with Tsar Bomba – to intimidate then president-elect Kennedy and to compensate for the lack of strength implied by the USSR not having any missile launch points close to the American mainland, a lacuna that also led to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    Source for many details (+ being an interesting firsthand account you should read anyway): here. Featured image: The RDS-220 weapon seconds after detonation, as its fireball develops overhead unto to its maximum width of 8 km and height of 10 km. Source: Reuters/YouTube.

  • Is Covaxin’s WHO approval guaranteed?

    I suspect after reading this PTI report that the WHO is practically helping Bharat Biotech put together a better application to have its COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, get the body’s approval for international use, instead of simply considering what Bharat Biotech chooses to submit. The overall tone of the report is mollificatory – as if the WHO wishes to appease both the angry and the doubtful that the many months the relevant committee is taking to decide on Covaxin’s candidature shouldn’t be taken as a comment on the Indian vaccine-manufacturing industry. The biggest supplier of vaccines to the WHO’s COVAX initiative is Serum Institute of India, in Pune, so the WHO has a conflict of interest when it says it holds the industry in good esteem. But even vis-à-vis Bharat Biotech (whose production planning and output have both been disappointing), PTI writes:

    India’s Bharat Biotech has been submitting data on the EUL of Covaxin “regularly and very quickly” to a technical committee which hopes to have a final recommendation to the WHO next week, a top official of the global health agency said on Thursday, stressing that the UN body “trusts” the Indian industry that manufactures high quality vaccines.

    There is something of an analogy with customer service. Say two companies both sell the same product at the same price. Company A’s customer service is excellent and its product has a quality rating of 75%. Company B’s customer service is average and its product has a quality rating of 100%. Which company will you buy from? I’d pick Company B because being spared the trouble of having to contact customer service is more valuable than having to contact customer service and then having a good experience. The same goes for Bharat Biotech’s application with the WHO for Covaxin: the company has been submitting more information “regularly and very quickly”? Great. But why does it have to do this at all instead of keeping all the data ready before any kind of approval?

    This characterisation of Bharat Biotech by the “top official” also feeds into what the committee is prepared to do en route to Covaxin’s apparently impending approval. As the PTI report says later:

    [Bruce Aylward, senior advisor to the WHO chief,] added that WHO’s job is to save as many lives as possible and as fast as possible. This includes ensuring no product lies unused.

    Considering COVAX’s premise, to ensure everyone everywhere has access to vaccines instead of just the rich guys (and ignoring its inability to fulfill this mandate so far), what Aylward says is desirable, that all good vaccines should be used up. But this also raises a question about where the WHO draws the line between rejecting a bad application and accepting a bad application and helping to make it good.

    Covaxin is clearly a bad product – its clinical trial, its emergency-use approval, its rollout and the agonising wait for access to the trial data (followed subsequently by issues of trial ethics and data quality) threw up so many questions, but none of the Drug Controller General, Bharat Bitoech or the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) have deigned to answer any of them, at least not honestly. This was followed later by questions about how Bharat Biotech, and the Indian government with it, estimated that the company would be able to produce X number of doses by certain dates, only to fall strikingly short on each occasion, so much so that together with Serum Institute’s failure to project output and demand, India – the “vaccine superpower” that ICMR’s Balram Bhargava recently said it was – had a shameful vaccine shortage for the first half of 2021.

    As good as the science underlying BBV152 may have been, Covaxin the product is untrustworthy. This isn’t a comment on the science so much as a reiteration of the oft-overlooked fact that science progressively gives away to social issues that emerge in non-linear fashion when science’s requirements collide with societal gradients, particularly once the giant phase 3 tests have begun.

    Given all of these issues, the WHO committee repeatedly asking for more data from Bharat Biotech regarding Covaxin served to highlight – loudly and effectively – an immutable fact: that the Indian government and Bharat Biotech didn’t have this data at the time the Drug Controller General approved the vaccine for emergency use (in “clinical trial mode” to boot) in January 2021, and probably that Bharat Biotech didn’t have this data ready when it claimed, on more than one occasion, that it had submitted all the info it had on Covaxin to the WHO.

    Now, with a WHO committee member seemingly suggesting that Covaxin’s approval is a question of when, not if, are we to believe that the vaccine is really good and that we’re all thinking about it wrong? This is an important question, to me at least, because one less-than-ideal alternative is to contemplate how one committee can ‘fix’ a vaccine – by legitimising it with its approval – that is so broken that even with the Indian government’s support, only some 11% of eligible Indians have taken it. Another is to confront the similarly dispiriting possibility that millions of people are so desperate for vaccines around the world that the WHO can no longer afford to stop at being a quality filter – and should step up to help insincere vaccine-makers over the fence. (Recall the ‘right to choose without choices’ from January?)

    Any which way, the implied promise of approval seems to me to be too much of an easy way out for Bharat Biotech, and the intractable, unabashed Indian government behind it.

  • Where the atmanirbharta in spine?

    Truth be told, I didn’t expect CSIR chief Shekhar Mande could be so disingenuous. “India didn’t have to depend on western countries,” he says. What is this abject refusal to thank other countries for help – and preferring instead to take their help and rewriting the past to pretend we didn’t need any?

    Of all those who received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in India, 88% received Covishield, which was first conceived by scientists in the UK and licensed by a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company to an Indian manufacturer. Even Covaxin, which accounts for the remaining 12% (screw Sputnik V), draws on technologies perfected by scientists in the US, among other places, against the SARS and MERS viruses. And while India’s drug controller approved a glut of drugs to treat severe COVID-19, the rights to the most popular among them and which also demonstrated some efficacy in any well-designed trials and observational studies – remdesivir – belong to a Californian pharmaceutical company.

    Some of the special containers and chemical reagents required to conduct RT-PCR tests are mostly imported. Indian industry adapted in a relatively short span of time to boost local production of masks, PPE kits and syringes, but there’s a lot that it depended on the west for and for which the west depended on India.

    In The Statesman article, ICMR chief Balram Bhargava also says, “The experience of developing Covaxin has instilled self-confidence in us that India is now much more than the pharmacy of the world. It is also a vaccine superpower.” Kind sir, India is no longer the ‘pharmacy of the world’. And we’d have to be a shitty kind of “vaccine superpower”, whatever that means, to a) run low on vaccines and syringes and completely fail to see that coming, b) celebrate 100-crore preordained inoculations, c) go so gung-ho with COVID-19 that we fail to deliver doses of a DTP vaccine to 3 million children in a year (the world’s highest) and d) preferentially award vaccine-making contracts to private companies.

    Of course, BB has been a foregone conclusion for a while. But that Mande can thump his chest like this… Are we to believe, then, that the rumours about why the Manipal Centre for Virus Research was shut, just as the pandemic was beginning, are true? That it was poised to undermine, with its foreign funds, foreign collaborations and foreign-trained scientists, the ‘Make in India’ narrative that the government as much as the government-funded scientific enterprise is wedded to.

    Perhaps the most regrettable thing about Mande’s comment is that – if the head of India’s largest government-funded scientific research establishment is prepared to lie in public, and to himself, that Indian researchers, manufacturers, traders, healthcare workers and patients didn’t want for anything that wasn’t already available in the country in early 2020, he is also prepared to believe there aren’t any problems that need to be fixed or resolved today either. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but I don’t have my hopes up. Whatever we’re atma-nirbhar with today, it isn’t spine among government scientists, it seems.

  • Why you should care about the Uttarakhand floods

    You already know why. We all do.

  • The great Nobel Prize hypocrisy

    Katie Langin’s report for Science on October 12 is an eye-opening account of one reason why the committees that pick every year’s Nobel Prize winners almost never pick women: because they aren’t nominated. Given the Nobel Foundation’s frustrating policy of secrecy, there aren’t many numbers available for us to work with, but Langin’s report adds one more column to the mix. Quoting from her piece:

    The selection committees have generally been secretive about nominee statistics, citing a Nobel Foundation statute stipulating nominations be kept secret for 50 years. But committee members shared summaries of the data with Science. The total number of nominations for a physiology or medicine Nobel jumped from about 350 in 2015 to 874 this year. Over those years, the percentage of female nominees more than doubled, from 5% in 2015 to 13% this year. The chemistry committee saw a similar increase: At 7% to 8%, female nominees have doubled their share since 2018. A representative for the physics committee declined to share exact figures, but wrote in an email, “The number of nominated women has increased significantly in the last few years.”

    In Langin’s telling (here and in other parts of her piece), the committees and some of their quoted members sound like they’re constrained by the number of women nominated. There is, more broadly, a noticeable vein of objectivitism running through the article, reflecting what sort of arguments the committees themselves will and won’t admit vis-à-vis their decision-making process. Here are some telling lines:

    Members of the powerful selection committees that sort through the nominations say they aren’t satisfied with the progress. “The fraction of women among the nominated people is very low and I don’t think it represents the [fraction of] women that were doing science even 20 years ago,” says Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, a biophysical chemist at Chalmers University of Technology who is one of two women on the eight-person chemistry committee.

    “We want to have more women nominated,” agrees Eva Olsson, an experimental physicist at Chalmers who is a member of the physics selection committee.

    This year, the physics committee had seven men and one woman, the chemistry committee was composed of six men and two women, and the physiology or medicine committee had the highest proportion of women, with 13 men and five women.

    “Thanks to new recruitments over the recent ten years or so, the proportion of women [on the committee] is now similar to the proportion of female full professors at the [institute],” Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the physiology or medicine committee and a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute, in an email to Science. [Paraphrased]

    The committees don’t consider gender when they discuss which discovery to award a Nobel Prize, Olsson says. “The focus is on science.”

    The reason I’m getting into this is that waiting for the number of women scientists nominated to increase or double or whatever before including them among the laureates seems like a red herring. The ‘availability’ of women in the pool of nominations, which committee members can then pick from, has never been the problem. We all know there are too few women scientists; Göran Hansson, the head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, even said yesterday that “it’s sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past, but still existing.” The problem is that the Nobel Prize committees aren’t defying convention to pick and highlight women, that they’re waiting for the real world to fix the problem first before – from their point of view – simply reflecting that in the composition of their laureate lists. But when the laurel is as prominent and as storied as a Nobel Prize, we need affirmative action.

    But Hansson put paid to this possibility when he said in the same interview that the prizes will never have gender quotas, obviously mindless of the stunning hypocrisy. The most legitimate protests against the prizes are rooted not in the narrower domain of awarding more men than women but in the wider one of the prizes having never reflected the conditions in which science is practiced in the real world. (The prizes are not awarded posthumously, and only to three laureates at a time, for example.) And Langin’s article doesn’t touch on this possibility at all. In fact, it pushes the next weightiest argument against the Nobel Prizes to the last paragraph:

    “How people get on whatever list of possible nominees is a mystery to most people,” [Handelsman] says. “If women are unaware of whatever that political process is, then they can’t place themselves in the appropriate situations or [get] linked to the right people who can help them get nominated.”

    That is, the committee that deliberates on the nominations is not happy that so few women are being nominated, while no one (outside the Nobel Foundation) knows the people staffing the nomination committees. Now, it’s unlikely to be the case that the many more men who are nominated for the Nobel Prizes start off knowing what these political processes are; it seems likelier that the bias against women begins not from women not knowing what these processes are but from biases on the part of the ‘low-level’ nominators, so to speak (I don’t care if they don’t have many women to pick from or what their idea of the Nobel Prizes is).

    Handelsman may be right that women may not be ‘naturally’ clued in to these processes, but expecting them to assume this work, in addition to science work, seems like the wrong way to solve this problem. It’s also wronger that the nominators’ identities are such a secret, effectively blocking our view of them and their thought-processes behind the same veil that the likes of Anthony Fauci have used to separate science from society.

    What’s the right way to solve this problem? Dismantle the Nobel Prizes.