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Is AI ready to mass-produce lay summaries of research articles?

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AI chatbot use showing a tablet screen with language bubbles on top of it.

Generative AI might be a powerful tool in making research more accessible for scientists and the broader public alike.Credit: Getty

Thinking back to the early days of her PhD programme, Esther Osarfo-Mensah recalls struggling to keep up with the literature. “Sometimes, the wording or the way the information is presented actually makes it quite a task to get through a paper,” says the biophysicist at University College London. Lay summaries could be a time-saving solution. Short synopses of research articles written in plain language could help readers to decide which papers to focus on -— but they aren’t common in scientific publishing. Now, the buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) has pushed software engineers to develop platforms that can mass produce these synopses.

Scientists are drawn to AI tools because they excel at crafting text in accessible language, and they might even produce clearer lay summaries than those written by people. A study1 released last year looked at lay summaries published in one journal and found that those created by people were less readable than were the original abstracts -— potentially because some researchers struggle to replace jargon with plain language or to decide which facts to include when condensing the information into a few lines.

AI lay-summary platforms come in a variety of forms (see ‘AI lay-summary tools’). Some allow researchers to import a paper and generate a summary; others are built into web servers, such as the bioRxiv preprint database.

AI lay-summary tools

Several AI resources have been developed to help readers glean information about research articles quickly. They offer different perks. Here are a few examples and how they work:

– SciSummary: This tool parses the sections of a paper to extract the key points and then runs those through the general-purpose large language model GPT-3.5 to transform them into a short summary written in plain language. Max Heckel, the tool’s founder, says it incorporates multimedia into the summary, too: “If it determines that a particular section of the summary is relevant to a figure or table, it will actually show that table or figure in line.”

– Scholarcy: This technology takes a different approach. Its founder, Phil Gooch, based in London, says the tool was trained on 25,000 papers to identify sentences containing verb phrases such as “has been shown to” that often carry key information about the study. It then uses a mixture of custom and open-source large language models to paraphrase those sentences in plain text. “You can actually create ten different types of summaries,” he adds, including one that lays out how the paper is related to previous publications.

– SciSpace: This tool was trained on a repository of more than 280 million data sets, including papers that people had manually annotated, to extract key information from articles. It uses a mixture of proprietary fine-tuned models and GPT-3.5 to craft the summary, says the company’s chief executive, Saikiran Chandha, based in San Francisco, California. “A user can ask questions on top of these summaries to further dig into the paper,” he notes, adding that the company plans to develop audio summaries that people can tune into on the go.

Benefits and drawbacks

Mass-produced lay summaries could yield a trove of benefits. Beyond helping scientists to speed-read the literature, the synopses can be disseminated to people with different levels of expertise, including members of the public. Osarfo-Mensah adds that AI summaries might also aid people who struggle with English. “Some people hide behind jargon because they don’t necessarily feel comfortable trying to explain it,” she says, but AI could help them to rework technical phrases. Max Heckel is the founder of SciSummary, a company in Columbus, Ohio, that offers a tool that allows users to import a paper to be summarized. The tool can also translate summaries into other languages, and is gaining popularity in Indonesia and Turkey, he says, arguing that it could topple language barriers and make science more accessible.

Despite these strides, some scientists feel that improvements are needed before we can rely on AI to describe studies accurately.

Will Ratcliff, an evolutionary biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, argues that no tool can produce better text than can professional writers. Although researchers have different writing abilities, he invariably prefers reading scientific material produced by study authors over those generated by AI. “I like to see what the authors wrote. They put craft into it, and I find their abstract to be more informative,” he says.

Nana Mensah, a PhD student in computational biology at the Francis Crick Institute in London, adds that, unlike AI, people tend to craft a narrative when writing lay summaries, helping readers to understand the motivations behind each step of the study. He says, however, that one advantage of AI platforms is that they can write summaries at different reading levels, potentially broadening the audience. In his experience, however, these synopses might still include jargon that can confuse readers without specialist knowledge.

AI tools might even struggle to turn technical language into lay versions at all. Osarfo-Mensah works in biophysics, a field with many intricate parameters and equations. She found that an AI summary of one of her research articles excluded information from a whole section. If researchers were looking for a paper with those details and consulted the AI summary, they might abandon her paper and look for other work.

Andy Shepherd, scientific director at global technology company Envision Pharma Group in Horsham, UK, has in his spare time compared the performances of several AI tools to see how often they introduce blunders. He used eight text generators, including general ones and some that had been optimized to produce lay summaries. He then asked people with different backgrounds, such as health-care professionals and the public, to assess how clear, readable and useful lay summaries were for two papers.

“All of the platforms produced something that was coherent and read like a reasonable study, but a few of them introduced errors, and two of them actively reversed the conclusion of the paper,” he says. It’s easy for AI tools to make this mistake by, for instance, omitting the word ‘not’ in a sentence, he explains. Ratcliff cautions that AI summaries should be viewed as a tool’s “best guess” of what a paper is about, stressing that it can’t check facts.

Broader readership

The risk of AI summaries introducing errors is one concern among many. Another is that one benefit of such summaries — that they can help to share research more widely among the public — could also have drawbacks. The AI summaries posted alongside bioRxiv preprints, research articles that have yet to undergo peer review, are tailored to different levels of reader expertise, including that of the public. Osarfo-Mensah supports the effort to widen the reach of these works. “The public should feel more involved in science and feel like they have a stake in it, because at the end of the day, science isn’t done in a vacuum,” she says.

But others point out that this comes with the risk of making unreviewed and inaccurate research more accessible. Mensah says that academics “will be able to treat the article with the sort of caution that’s required”, but he isn’t sure that members of the public will always understand when a summary refers to unreviewed work. Lay summaries of preprints should come with a “hazard warning” informing the reader upfront that the material has yet to be reviewed, says Shepherd.

“We agree entirely that preprints must be understood as not peer-reviewed when posted,” says John Inglis, co-founder of bioRxiv, who is based at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He notes that such a disclaimer can be found on the homepage of each preprint, and if a member of the public navigates to a preprint through a web search, they are first directed to the homepage displaying this disclaimer before they can access the summary. But the warning labels are not integrated into the summaries, so there is a risk that these could be shared on social media without the disclaimer. Inglis says bioRxiv is working with its partner ScienceCast, whose technology produces the synopses, on adding a note to each summary to negate this risk.

As is the case for many other nascent generative-AI technologies, humans are still working out the messaging that might be needed to ensure users are given adequate context. But if AI lay-summary tools can successfully mitigate these and other challenges, they might become a staple of scientific publishing.

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China’s medical-device industry gets a makeover

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China wants to use and manufacture more of its own medical equipment.Credit: VCG via Getty Images

As a sinology student in the early 1990s at Nanjing University, Elisabeth Staudinger “got a flavour of what health care felt like for the people in China”. As part of her studies, she had to venture more than 2,000 kilometres to Yunnan in China’s southwest corner. Back then, parts of the province were so remote that people who needed medical attention would often have to wait for Mondays to roll around, when visiting merchants, physicians and dentists would set up shop in a weekly market.

“Fast forward to today, you have very reasonable hospitals and health-care infrastructures across the country” alongside near-universal health coverage, says Staudinger, who is now a managing board member of the global medical technology company Siemens Healthineers in Erlangen, Germany. “Things are massively better than it used to be,” she says. “But there’s still a lot of work to do.”

China has a population of around 1.4 billion people, one-fifth of whom are over the age of 60. A burgeoning middle class and the accompanying rise in medical conditions linked to affluence, such as type 2 diabetes and hypertension, has meant that China has embraced preventive care, alongside treatment, says Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau, an analyst who studies science, technology and innovation at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a think tank in Berlin. But this has meant opening up the market to expensive treatments and technology, he says.

Aware of the costs, the Chinese government began a drive around a decade ago to produce and use more locally manufactured medical devices, says analyst Alexander Brown, also at MERICS. In particular, the focus has been on high-end equipment such as X-ray scanners, which can aid early disease detection. The push intensified further in 2021, in the hope of slashing costs and meeting the evolving health-care needs of an ageing population, while also boosting innovation and enhancing national security by curtailing imports.

The strategy is affecting both China’s medical-device sector and the medical-technology industry as a whole. Medical technology includes devices that use information technology to detect, collect and upload data. Hospitals in China have been instructed to procure products made in the country when possible, and domestic and foreign manufacturers have altered their business operations and focus. In 2021, the most recent year for which data were available, China held 20% of the medical-device market share, second only to the United States.

Gathering momentum

The Chinese government promotes its ‘make local, buy local’ strategy in a variety of ways: dedicated innovation parks, subsidies and research funding for domestic medical-technology companies, and centralized volume-based purchasing for public hospitals.

“But technically there is only one regulation on the books that is explicitly around Chinese-product procurement,” says Helen Chen, a managing partner based in Shanghai at the global firm L.E.K. Consulting. In May 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Finance introduced Order 551, which comprises a list of 315 products. Around half of these are medical equipment such as ophthalmic lenses and medical lasers, while the rest includes items such as those used in marine, geological and geophysical work — ground-based radars, for example. State-owned firms looking to procure such items must ensure that the equipment is made of 25–100% of locally manufactured parts.

Order 551 must be viewed in the broader context, says Chen, “which is that China, in general, is trying to be much more self-sufficient in its health-care products”. The directive came just a month after the Chinese government outlined a five-year plan aimed at propelling six or more Chinese companies into the world’s top 50 medical-device firms — up from the 4 that were in the top 100 in 2021. The country’s ambition for its medical-device sector can be traced back further, however. In 2010, medical devices were identified as one of 20 Strategic Emerging Industries — alongside biotechnology, renewable energy, and the Internet of Things — and the central government began dedicating five-year plans to the sector.

In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping highlighted the cause further, announcing: “It is necessary to accelerate the localization of high-end medical devices to decrease production costs and to promote the continuous development of national enterprises.” The pivot to producing products such as high-value imaging, diagnostic and treatment equipment — including computed tomography (CT) scanners, ultrasound and dialysis machines, as well as implantables such as pacemakers — is particularly notable because up until that point, medical manufacturing had centred mainly on producing syringes, gloves, gauzes and other low-end disposables (see ‘Medical machines’).

Medical machines: bar chart shows firms from China won a higher proportion of contracts for computed tomography scanners from Chinese hospitals than they did in previous years.

Source: Alexander Brown/Merics

But for industry watchers such as Chen, the real game-changer occurred in 2015, when the government announced its Made in China 2025 (MIC2025) initiative. The strategic plan boldly declared the country aimed to become a global manufacturing powerhouse for ten industries — including robotics, electric vehicles and medical devices — by 2025. China hopes to achieve this by boosting local industrial capabilities in research and development, design, and the procurement of crucial components, as well as by moving assembly processes into the country.

Among other targets, MIC2025 calls for 70% of mid-to-high-end medical devices to be produced domestically by 2025, and for this to rise to 95% by 2030.

With only a year to the first deadline, Brown says: “I think they still have a way to go. They haven’t been able to catch up as much as they would have liked in contrast to something like new-energy vehicles.”

“But it’s not for the lack of effort — China has been funnelling a lot of money into the sector. I think the hurdles are partly to do with the highly specialized nature of medical devices,” Brown adds. “Still, Made in China has had the greatest impact in terms of building up local industrial capacity.”

And it’s a tried-and-tested approach. The country has gained dominance in industries such as pharmaceuticals, solar panels and machine tools, according to a report by Brussels-based think tank, the European Centre for International Political Economy. Policymakers first identify sectors and technologies that they think are important to the country’s economic development and security. The government then initiates policies to grow domestic industries that can challenge global firms (see go.nature.com/49rlyhv).

China’s ambitions for its medical-device industry look no different. A profusion of policy and fiscal initiatives to boost local production and use of medical devices appeared after MIC2025. In April 2022, for instance, provincial governments in Anhui, Hubei and Shanxi told hospitals to limit their use of medical and testing equipment to those produced domestically.

The government also began offering incentives, such as reduced rent, to entice firms to move or set up offices in four medical-device industrial zones — the Bohai Economic Rim including Beijing; the Yangtze River Delta encompassing Shanghai; the Pearl River Delta, made up of Guangdong, Shenzhen and a handful of other cities; and Central China, which includes Wuhan, Chengdu and Chongqing. It also increased tax benefits for research and development investments: rising from 1.7 billion yuan (US$236 million) in 2017 to 11.4 billion yuan in 2022, according to a MERICS analysis of 122 medical-technology firms listed on the Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing stock exchanges (see go.nature.com/3urvdkn).

In July 2023, the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology began mass producing a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) instrument it had developed. And at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, United Imaging Healthcare in Shanghai supplied more than 100 domestically produced CT scanners and X-ray machines to hospitals including those in Wuhan, Shanghai and Beijing.

In 2019, one of China’s biggest medical-technology firms, MicroPort in Shanghai, reported that surgeons had completed the first successful surgery, a prostatectomy, with its lacroscopic robot Toumai. The four-armed Toumai can do complex surgeries in narrow spaces in the body, such as urethral reconstructions. It can even be operated remotely.

Ripples far and wide

According to a 2021 analysis by consultancy firm Deloitte (see go.nature.com/3uyujzw), the market revenue of China’s medical-device industry more than doubled between 2015 and 2019, constantly outpacing the expansion in gross domestic product with an annual growth rate of roughly 20% since the launch of MIC2025.

Some sectors have even begun to turn the tide on trade — manufacturers of pacemakers, for instance, saw their global exports grow by 110% between 2015 and 2020. Meanwhile, sales of pacemakers by foreign competitors to China rose by 2%.

Overall, the market share of domestic brands producing high-end devices has risen from 20% to 30% in the past decade. US and European multinationals such as Siemens, GE HealthCare and Medtronic continue to dominate the sector, however, says Rohit Anand, an analyst at the consulting firm GlobalData in Hyderabad, India. This difference in market share boils down to “substantial disparity in product quality, scale and efficiency”, he says.

Person in foreground wearing protective clothing and face mask, working on plastic equipment

Parts of high-end devices such as computed tomography scanners are now made in China.Credit: Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty

Brown observes that medical devices are niche products that require specialized knowledge, and Chinese firms have struggled to gain a foothold.

Citing medical robotics as an example, he adds: “There isn’t a big market in China because they are very expensive. The average Chinese customer just can’t afford to pay for that, and the ones that can afford to would probably opt for a leading American firm over some inexperienced Chinese one.”

Attitudes among medical professionals are changing, however. A 2020 survey of Chinese hospital workers, conducted by the firm L.E.K. Consulting, found that 3% “use Chinese materials when possible”. In a follow-up survey a year later, after Order 551, around 30% said they always use Chinese materials (see go.nature.com/3iba26v).

Often, the decision comes down to practicalities, says Deloitte analyst Alan MacCharles in Shanghai. “You might have two or three options and the doctor might say: ‘The Western device is slightly better but because I haven’t had training on that system in awhile, I’m much more proficient with the Chinese brands.’”

Because of new purchasing regulations, many international manufacturers have opted to establish local operations in China. Some partner with local firms, setting up joint ventures, such as the ones between Sinopharm Imaging in Beijing and US firm GE Healthcare, or between Shanghai Electric and Siemens.

A handful of prominent foreign firms have established their own manufacturing plants in the country. Sysmex in Kobe, Japan, now assembles its blood and urine testing equipment in Shandong. Similarly, Dutch firm Philips produces a handful of high-end scanners in China, such as its EPIQ Elite ultrasound series, which includes an AI-powered cardiovascular machine. In 2020, Philips launched its Ingenia Ambition MRI, which is made in China and boasts a 50% reduction in scan times. It is the first MRI to operate without helium gas, a non-renewable resource that is in scarce supply.

And at an international trade fair last May, GE Healthcare displayed 23 medical devices, 18 of which were made and developed in China. One highlight was the ultra-high-end Revolution CT scanner, which boasts the ability to conduct a coronary examination “in one heartbeat under any heart rate and rhythm conditions”, according to GE Healthcare. The firm began manufacturing the scanner at its Beijing factory in 2020. Of the CT equipment that the company ships to customers worldwide, 70% are made at that factory.

Making the decision to start manufacturing in China isn’t taken lightly. “It’s not an easy process because the cost of building these plants for high-end devices is high,” says MacCharles. “You can have local supply-chain and intellectual-property issues, it takes years to get fully certified and basically you can’t produce anything for quite some time.”

US firms, in particular, face challenges, given the ongoing tensions between the two nations, says Grace Fu Palma, founder of China Med Device in Beijing, a consultancy that offers regulatory and business advice to foreign firms looking to enter the Chinese market. “The political situation is definitely having a negative impact on the entry of foreign firms.”

Staudinger says that China continues to be a priority location for Siemens, which has been operating there for more than 30 years and has six research and development sites in the country, despite increasing pressures for consumers to buy from local firms. “The regulations are sometimes projected as this thing where they want to get foreign companies out of the country,” she says. “But that is not what we have experienced.”

“As long as you’re part of the journey and a part of supporting the direction of building a robust, high-quality health-care system in China,” says Staudinger, “you’ll feel very welcome.”

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Mathematician who tamed randomness wins Abel Prize

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Michel Talagrand.

Michel Talagrand studies stochastic processes, mathematical models of phenomena that are governed by randomness.Credit: Peter Bagde/Typos1/Abel Prize 2024

A mathematician who developed formulas to make random processes more predictable, and helped to solve an iconic model of complex phenomena, has won the 2024 Abel Prize, one of the field’s most coveted awards. Michel Talagrand received the prize for his “contributions to probability theory and functional analysis, with outstanding applications in mathematical physics and statistics”, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo announced on 20 March.

Assaf Naor, a mathematician at Princeton University in New Jersey, says it is difficult to overestimate the impact of Talagrand’s work. “There are papers posted maybe on a daily basis where the punchline is ‘now we use Talagrand’s inequalities’,” he says.

Talagrand’s reaction on hearing the news was incredulity. “There was a total blank in my mind for at least four seconds,” he says. “If I had been told an alien ship had landed in front of the White House, I would not have been more surprised.”

The Abel Prize was modelled after the Nobel Prizes — which do not include mathematics — and was awarded for the first time in 2003. The recipient wins a sum of 7.5 million Norwegian kroner (US$700,000).

‘Like a piece of art’

Talagrand specializes in the theory of probability and stochastic processes, which are mathematical models of phenomena governed by randomness. A typical example is a river’s water level, which is highly variable and is affected by many independent factors, including rain, wind and temperature, Talagrand says. His proudest achievement was a set of formulas that poses limits to the swings in such a stochastic process. His formulas express how the contributions of many factors often cancel each other out — making the overall result less variable, not more.

“It’s like a piece of art,” says Abel-committee chair Helge Holden, a mathematician at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. “The magic here is to find a good estimate, not just a rough estimate.”

Thanks to Talagrand’s techniques, “many things that seem complicated and random turn out to be not so random”, says Naor. His estimates are extremely powerful, for example for studying problems such as optimizing the route of a delivery truck. Finding a perfect solution would require an exorbitant amount of computation, so computer scientists can instead calculate the lengths of a limited number of random candidate routes and then take the average — and Talegrand’s inequalities ensure that the result is close to optimal.

Talagrand also completed the solution to a problem posed by theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi — work that ultimately helped Parisi to earn a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. In 1979, Parisi, now at the University of Rome, proposed a complete solution for the structure of a spin glass — a simple, abstracted model of a material in which the magnetization of each atom tends to flip up or down depending on those of its neighbours.

Parisi’s arguments were rooted in his powerful intuition in physics, and followed steps that “mathematicians would consider as sorcery”, Talagrand says, such as taking n copies of a system — with n being a negative number. Many researchers doubted that Parisi’s proof could be made mathematically rigorous. But in the early 2000s, the problem was completely solved in two separate works, one by Talagrand2 and an earlier one by Francesco Guerra3, a mathematical physicist also at the University of Rome.

Finding motivation

Talagrand’s journey to becoming a top researcher was unconventional. Born in Béziers, France, in 1952, at age five he lost vision in his right eye because of a genetic predisposition to detachment of the retina. Although while growing up in Lyon he was a voracious reader of popular science magazines, he struggled at school, particularly with the complex rules of French spelling. “I never really made peace with orthography,” he told an interviewer in 2019.

His turning point came at age 15, when he received emergency treatment for another retinal detachment, this time in his left eye. He had to miss almost an entire year of school. The terrifying experience of nearly losing his sight — and his father’s efforts to keep his mind busy while his eyes were bandaged — gave Talagrand a renewed focus. He became a highly motivated student after his recovery, and began to excel in national maths competitions.

Still, Talagrand did not follow the typical path of gifted French students, which includes two years of preparatory school, followed by a national selection for highly selective grandes écoles such as the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Instead, he studied at the University of Lyon, France, and then went on to work as a full-time researcher at the national research agency CNRS, first in Lyon and later in Paris, where he spent more than a decade in an entry-level job. Apart from a brief stint in Canada, followed by a trip to the United States where he met his wife, he worked at CNRS until his retirement.

Talagrand loves to challenge other mathematicians to solve problems that he has come up with — offering cash to those who do — and he keeps a list of those problems on his website. Some have been solved, leading to publications in major maths journals. The prizes come with some conditions: “I will award the prizes below as long as I am not too senile to understand the proofs I receive. If I can’t understand them, I will not pay.”

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why I’m fighting racial inequality in prostate-cancer research

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Black doctor in white coat speaking with a Black senior patient in an office

One in four Black men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer.Credit: Getty

Olugbenga Samuel Oyeniyi’s research at the University of Sunderland, UK, explores why many Black men do not seek help for symptoms of prostate cancer and uses Black peer educators to change mindsets in the community. March is Prostate Cancer Awareness Month in the United Kingdom.

What drew you to research?

I worked in a hospital laboratory in Enugu in southeastern Nigeria after completing a bachelor’s degree in microbiology at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife in 2006. Then I did a one-year master’s programme in biomedicine at the University of Portsmouth, UK, researching glioblastoma. My heart was set on academia, so in 2014, after working as a pre-clinical-trials research scientist based in industry, I started a PhD in applied microbiology at the University of Sunderland, looking at the Acanthamoeba parasite, which can cause blindness, among other things.

How did you get into prostate-cancer research?

In December 2020, I got a job as a senior scientist overseeing COVID-19 samples in a lab in Gateshead, UK, eventually becoming operations manager, which involved working with the University of Sunderland’s vice-chancellor, the local mayor and a member of Parliament. After the lab closed in May 2022, I saw an advert for a postdoctoral research associate in public health with a focus on prostate cancer. I automatically thought it was not for me — I was a clinical scientist dreaming of finding a cure for malaria. But then I read that one in four Black men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, compared with one in eight white men, according to UK figures. That got my attention. I had a further look and it said one in 12 of those will die of it, compared with one in 24 white men. I thought, “Woah, this is affecting me” — I’m the eldest of four brothers. And not just me, but my community.

I started in September 2022, coordinating the research for Early Diagnosis of Prostate cancer for Black Men (PROCAN-B) project. It’s funded by Prostate Cancer Research, a London-based charity that supports research in this field in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Our aim is to reduce the obstacles to early diagnoses and save lives. What makes this work special is that it is research for Black men in the community, facilitated by Black men in the community, coordinated by a Black researcher.

How does the project work?

Our team includes public-health researchers, behavioural scientists, a psychologist, myself as project manager and two research assistants from the Black community who recruit the focus-group participants.

In October 2022, we created a community-led advisory and engagement group (also known as public involvement and community engagement, or PICE) made up of 13 Black men aged 47–63 from two parts of the United Kingdom: the northeast of England and Scotland. None of them had experienced prostate cancer personally, but one had a brother who was being treated for the disease.

We met three times to discuss the barriers to diagnosis and had a further three meetings to co-design interventions, such as community workshops to tackle some of these barriers to diagnosis. Then we had a further three meetings to train the group as peer facilitators to deliver the workshops. The first workshops took place in Sunderland and Glasgow in November 2023, with ten participants in each. We had feedback sessions a month later and used this information to refine the community workshops. We found that the men were interested and engaged in the pilot sessions — there were questions about every presentation slide.

Olugbenga Samuel Oyeniyi

Olugbenga Samuel Oyeniyi’s interests now lie in public health and epidemiology.Credit: University of Sunderland

So, we gave the men a piece of paper to write down their questions and we moved the Q&A part of the session with a general medical practitioner (GP), who was from the Black community, from the middle of the session to the end.

We held further workshops with 20 men each in Middlesborough and Glasgow in February. In Middlesborough, the men were so engaged. We were supposed to finish at 8 p.m., but there were still so many questions for the GP that we went on for another hour.

Why do Black men with symptoms sometimes avoid getting help?

Trust is a big issue: lack of trust in the statistics; in the health-care system; and in GPs. Men might have had negative experiences with gatekeepers such as the GP surgery receptionist, for example. There are also religious and cultural factors, such as social stigma.

The PICE group noted that talking about intimate and sensitive health issues such as prostate cancer is difficult for Black men because it can be embarrassing. Discussing intimate issues was a challenge related to sexuality and manhood. Group members also believed that Black men are raised to feel ‘super’, or stronger than women, which makes it difficult to show weakness and vulnerability.

You also identified structural racism as a barrier. Can you tell us about that?

Some of the participants described experiencing discrimination and racism in the health-care system. They feel they are treated differently and the same standards of care aren’t applied or don’t apply to Black people. One participant commented that health-care providers’ questions regarding medical conditions visible through changes to skin colour are written for white people and might not be applicable to a Black man. In another example, most of the statistics posted in bus-stop and train-station campaign ads say prostate cancer affects one in eight men. This is also part of structural racism — those are the figures for white men.

Your campaign involved video footage of British actor Idris Elba and US actor Morgan Freeman. Tell us how that helped.

These men are incredibly influential and in 2021 filmed Embarrassed, a powerful video from Black UK film director Steve McQueen, which was part of a separate campaign. We use it to inform the focus groups.

We also use videos of UK religious leaders — a pastor and an imam — and Black male survivors of prostate cancer. Other videos involve women, some of whom appeal to the men’s emotional side, saying “Your health is important to us and your families — look after your prostate health.”

How does PROCAN-B fit alongside other Prostate Cancer Research funding?

Our research is one of several projects the charity has funded as part of its racial-disparity funding call, particularly focused on Black men and prostate cancer. For example, one study from the University of Essex in Colchester, UK, has found that genetic mutations could help to explain why Black men are at higher risk of developing prostate cancer than are men of other ethnicities.

What is the future for the research — and for you?

If the workshops continue to be successful and our research shows they are making an impact, they could be rolled out across the country with a much larger group of people in a randomized controlled trial, depending on funding.

My current contract is due to end in August 2024. I want to continue with research, become a senior lecturer and do a master’s in public health, ideally at one of the top UK universities, potentially the University of Edinburgh or the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

I believe the combination of laboratory studies and public-health research is key and crucial to comprehensive and extensive understanding of human health.

Eventually, my goal is to become a professor of public health and epidemiology, and to collaborate with researchers back home to address some of the health challenges facing Nigeria.

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Are we in the Anthropocene yet?

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Researchers stand on a raft on the surface of Crawford Lake and pull up sediment core samples

Researchers are investigating plutonium traces in the sediment of Crawford Lake in Canada as a marker for the start of the Anthropocene.Credit: Peter Power/AFP/Getty

For 15 years, geologists have been involved in a complicated technical process to determine whether human impacts on Earth systems amount to a new geological epoch. Earlier this month, 12 members of a subgroup of one of their professional bodies, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), voted that the ‘Anthropocene’ is not a new epoch that would have ended the Holocene epoch, which started some 11,700 ago at the end of the last ice age. Four voted in favour of the proposed new epoch. Some members want to annul the vote because of disagreements about whether ICS rules were followed, including during the voting process.

News of the vote, and the ensuing controversy, has created both confusion and concern, including among those currently working on Anthropocene science. This confusion arises because the term is understood and widely used by scientists, as well as people outside research, to mean a time in Earth’s history when humans are having severe biophysical impacts on the planet.

The concept is used by researchers in natural sciences, engineering, humanities and social sciences; by authors of books on the topic, film-makers, editors of journals with Anthropocene in the title and, indeed, by the Nature Portfolio. In 2023, we launched a newsletter called ‘Nature Briefing: Anthropocene’, highlighting research about humanity’s footprint on Earth.

The difficulty is that the concept has taken off while geologists have been locked in discussion about how the Anthropocene should be measured, and when it started. One concern is that a rejection of the proposed epoch could lead to the perception that scientists somehow doubt that there is a human fingerprint on global change.

The Anthropocene concept, in its wider sense, is more than one century old1. The word was used at least as long ago as 1922 by Russian geologist Aleksei Pavlov. The term was popularized after Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and US biologist Eugene Stoermer reintroduced it in 2000. At the time, Crutzen and Stoermer were less concerned with finding a precise start date than researchers are now, but they did have a preference2: “To assign a more specific date to the onset of the ‘anthropocene’ seems somewhat arbitrary, but we propose the latter part of the 18th century, although we are aware that alternative proposals can be made (some may even want to include the entire holocene).” In 2002, Crutzen wrote in Nature3: “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene. [It] could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.”

But words such as ‘epoch’ and ‘period’ have precise meanings in the study of Earth’s history, which is where the ICS, as a standards-setting body, comes in. According to conventions in geology, a new geological unit of time such as the Anthropocene needs permanent signals in rocks, sediment or glaciers. Candidates for such signals include microplastics, particulates from burnt fossil fuels, pesticide residues or radioactive isotopes from nuclear-bomb tests. The proposed marker location is Crawford Lake near Toronto, Canada, where plutonium from hydrogen-bomb tests, detected in 1952, settled in the lake’s sediment. As the latest vote demonstrates, there’s some way to go before this issue is resolved.

The current lack of agreement on a start date and which marker to use should not detract from the Anthropocene as a concept. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a useful comparison. The principle of a set of global goals and associated targets to end poverty and achieve environmental sustainability was agreed on by the international community in 2015. But the task of defining the goals, targets and indicators came later and was left to specialists, with policymakers pledging to stay out of the process.

The measurement of progress towards each of the 17 SDGs is the responsibility of a set of ‘custodian’ agencies. These are relevant international expert bodies, working with United Nations agencies. The custodians are charged with proposing measures for the goals and targets in their area of expertise. Periodically, the agencies come together to compare notes — for example, on targets for which data could be improved — and exchange ideas before returning to their individual groups to refine their knowledge. Working in this way, involving specialists from a variety of fields, undoubtedly helps to improve knowledge.

That process is still continuing. Even now, some nine years later, around one-third of the 231 unique data indicators for SDG targets are recorded in the second-highest category of accuracy. Whether countries are able to regularly produce data, a requirement of the highest tier, does not negate the necessity of achieving the goals. The same overarching principle could be applied to the Anthropocene. The absence of an agreed marker and a specific start date should not detract from the reality of a discernible human fingerprint on Earth systems.

Measurement matters. It is needed not least so that the world is confident that the Anthropocene’s start date and marker are grounded in the broadest consensus of scholarly knowledge. Geologists must quickly resolve their disagreements. At the same time, there is little doubt that the world is in an Anthropocene, as understood by researchers who use the term, and that course correction is needed.

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These ‘movies’ of proteins in action are revealing the hidden biology of cells

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Since the 1950s, scientists have had a pretty good idea of how muscles work. The protein at the centre of the action is myosin, a molecular motor that ratchets itself along rope-like strands of actin proteins — grasping, pulling, releasing and grasping again — to make muscle cells contract.

The basics were first explained in a pair of landmark papers in Nature1,2, and they have been confirmed and elaborated on by detailed molecular maps of myosin and its partners. Researchers think that myosin generates force by cocking back the long lever-like arm that is attached to the motor portion of the protein.

The only hitch is that scientists had never seen this fleeting pre-stroke state — until now.

In a preprint published in January3, researchers used a cutting-edge structural biology technique to record this moment, which lasts just milliseconds in living cells.

“It’s one of the things in the textbook you sort of gloss over,” says Stephen Muench, a structural biologist at the University of Leeds, UK, who co-led the study. “These are experiments that people wanted to do 40 years ago, but they just never had the technology.”

That technology — called time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) — now has structural biologists thinking like cinematographers, turning still snapshots of life’s molecular machinery into motion pictures that reveal how it works.

Muench and his colleagues’ myosin movie isn’t feature-length; it consists of just two frames showing different stages of the molecular motion. Yet it confirmed a decades-old theory and settled debates over the order of the steps in myosin’s choreography. Other researchers are focusing their new-found director’s eye on understanding cell-signalling systems, including those underlying opioid overdoses, the gene-editing juggernaut CRISPR–Cas9 and other molecular machines that have been mostly studied with highly detailed, yet static structural maps.

An animated gif showing a 3D molecular structures of a myosin molecule in two states using a lever arm to pull on an actin fillament

Researchers have been able to capture images of individual myosin proteins as they pull on an actin filament during muscle contraction, confirming key details of the motion. First, myosin becomes cocked or primed, then it attaches to actin and its lever arm swings in a power stroke that slides the filament by about 34 nanometres.Credit: Sean McMillan

“The big picture is to move away, as much as possible, from this single, static snapshot,” says Georgios Skiniotis, a structural biologist at Stanford University in California, whose team used the technique to record the activation of a type of cell-signalling molecule called a G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR)4. “I want the movie.”

Freeze frame

To underscore the power of cryo-EM, Skiniotis and others like to draw a comparison with one of the first motion pictures ever made. In the 1870s, photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography technology, which was cutting edge at the time, to capture a series of still images of a galloping horse. They showed, for the first time, that all four of the animal’s hooves leave the ground at once — something that the human eye could not distinguish.

Similar insights, Skiniotis says, will come from applying the same idea to protein structures. “I want to get a dynamic picture.”

The ability to map proteins and other biomolecules down to the location of individual atoms has transformed biology, underpinning advances in gene editing, drug discovery and revolutionary artificial-intelligence tools such as AlphaFold, which can predict protein structures. But the mostly static images delivered by X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM, the two technologies responsible for the lion’s share of determined protein structures, belie the dynamic nature of life’s molecules.

“Biomolecules are not made up of rocks,” says Sonya Hanson, a computational biophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. They exist in water and are constantly in motion. “They’re more like jelly,” adds Muench.

Biologists often say that “structure determines function”, but that’s not quite right, says Ulrich Lorenz, a molecular physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). The protein poses captured by most structural studies are energetically stable ‘equilibrium’ states that provide limited clues to the short-lived, unstable confirmations that are key to chemical reactions and other functions performed by molecular machines. “Structure allows you to infer function, but only incompletely and imperfectly, and you’re missing all of the details,” says Lorenz.

Cryo-EM is a great way to get at the details, but capturing these fleeting states requires careful preparation. Protein samples are pipetted onto a grid and then flash frozen with liquid ethane. They are then imaged using powerful electron beams that record snapshots of individual molecules (sophisticated software classifies and morphs these pictures into structural maps). The samples swim in water before being frozen, so any chemical reaction that can happen in a test tube can, in theory, be frozen in place on a cryo-EM grid — if researchers can catch it quickly enough.

That’s one of the first big challenges says Joachim Frank, a structural biologist at Columbia University in New York City who shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on cryo-EM. “Even for very dexterous people, it takes a few seconds.” In that time, any chemical reactions — and the intermediate structures that mediate the reactions — might be long gone before freezing. “This is the gap we want to fill,” says Frank.

Caught in translation

Frank’s team has attempted to solve this problem using a microfluidic chip. The device quickly mixes two protein solutions, allows them to react for a specified time period and then delivers reaction droplets onto a cryo-EM grid that is instantly frozen.

This year, Frank’s team used their device to study a bacterial enzyme that rescues ribosomes, the cell’s protein-making factories, if they stall in response to antibiotics or other stresses. The enzyme, called HflX, helps to recycle stuck ribosomes by popping their two subunits apart.

Frank’s team captured three images of HflX bound to the ribosome, over a span of 140 milliseconds, which show how it splits the ribosome like someone carefully removing the shell from an oyster. The enzyme breaks a dozen or so molecular bridges that hold a ribosome’s two subunits together, one by one, until just two are left and the ribosome pops open5. “The most surprising thing to me is that it’s a very orderly process,” Frank says. “You would think the ribosome is being split and that’s it.”

Muench and his colleagues, including Charlie Scarff, a structural biologist at the University of Leeds, and Howard White, a kineticist at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia also used a microfluidic chip to make their myosin movie by quickly mixing myosin and actin3.

But the molecular motor is so fast that, to slow things down ever further, they used a mutated version of myosin that operates about ten times slower than normal. This allowed the team to determine two structures, 110 milliseconds apart, that showed the swing of myosin’s lever-like arm. The structures also showed that a by-product of the chemical reaction that powers the motor — the breakdown of a cellular fuel called ATP — exits the protein’s active site before the lever swings and not after. “That is ending decades of conjecture,” says Scarff.

With this new model in mind, Scarff, whose specialty is myosin, and Muench are planning to use time-resolved cryo-EM to study how myosin dynamics are affected by certain drugs and mutations that are known to cause heart disease.

Microfluidic chips aren’t the only way researchers are putting time stamps on protein structures. A team led by Bridget Carragher, a structural biologist and the technical director at the Chan Zuckerberg Imaging Institute in Redwood City, California, developed a ‘spray and mix’ approach that involves shooting tiny volumes of reacting samples onto a grid before flash-freezing them6.

In another set-up — developed by structural physiologist Edward Twomey at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and his team — a flash of light triggers light-sensitive chemical reactions, which are stopped by flash-freezing7. Lorenz’s kit, meanwhile, takes already frozen samples and uses laser pulses to reanimate them for a few microseconds before they refreeze, all under the gaze of an electron microscope8.

‘Limitations everywhere’

The different approaches have their pros and cons. Carragher’s spray and mix approach uses minute sample volumes, which should be easy to obtain for most proteins; Twomey says his ‘open-source’ light-triggered device is relatively inexpensive and can be built for a few thousand dollars; and Lorenz says his laser-pulse system has the potential to record many more fleeting events than other time-resolved cryo-EM technologies — down to a tenth of a microsecond.

But these techniques are not yet ready to be rolled out. Currently, there are no commercial suppliers of time-resolved cryo-EM technology, limiting its reach, says Rouslan Efremov, a structural biologist at the VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology in Brussels. “All these things are fussy and hard to control and they haven’t really caught on,” adds Carragher.

Holger Stark, a structural biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany, says that current forms of time-resolved cryo-EM might be useful for some molecular machines that operate on the basis of large-scale movements — for example, the ribosome. However, the technology is not ready for use on just any biological system. “You have to cherry pick your subject,” he says. “We have limitations everywhere.”

Despite the shortcomings, there are plenty of interesting questions for researchers to start addressing now using these techniques. Twomey is using time-resolved cryo-EM to study Cas9, the DNA-cutting enzyme behind CRISPR gene editing, and says the insights could help to make more efficient gene-editing systems.

Lorenz used his laser-melting method to show how a plant virus swells up after it infects a cell to release its genetic material7 (see ‘Viral blow-up’). He is now studying other viral entry molecules such as HIV’s envelope protein. “We have these static structures, but we don’t know how the system makes it from one state to the other, and how the machinery works,” he says.

VIRAL BLOW UP: infographic showing a viral capsid from contracted to expanded states.

Source: Ref.8

Skiniotis’s team is investigating GPCRs, including one called the β-adrenergic receptor, which has been implicated in asthma. Their work4 shows how activating the receptor triggers it to shed its partner G-protein, a key step in propagating signals in cells.

The researchers are now studying the same process in a GPCR called the µ-opioid receptor, which is activated by morphine and fentanyl among other drugs. In preliminary unpublished results, they have found that the dynamics of the receptor help to explain why some drugs such as fentanyl are so potent in promoting G-protein activation, while others aren’t. Such insights, says Skiniotis, are glimpses of unseen biology that molecular movies promise to reveal. Just don’t forget the popcorn.

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Is the Mars rover’s rock collection worth $11 billion?

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An image from NASA's Mars Perseverance rover taken while it drills for rock samples.

The Perseverance rover drills a rock core from the edge of the ancient river delta in Jezero Crater on Mars.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Woodlands, Texas

Scientists are on edge as they wait for NASA to answer two of the most consequential questions in Mars exploration. Where on the red planet will the Perseverance rover collect its final rock samples? And can NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) even afford to fly the mission’s hard-won samples — the prize at the end of a decades-long quest — back to Earth?

Over the past few years, Perseverance has been exploring an ancient river delta in Mars’s Jezero Crater, with the aim of finding signs of past life. The rover’s belly is now stuffed with 17 tubes of Martian rock, dirt and air that scientists say represent an astounding geological collection. “The science is only getting better as we see what Perseverance keeps collecting,” says Laurie Leshin, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. But the rover’s instruments aren’t sophisticated enough to determine whether molecules in the samples point to signs of life, or to determine the samples’ age, and so reveal something about the history of Mars. For that, laboratories on Earth are needed.

However, bringing Perseverance’s samples back could cost as much as US$11 billion, an independent panel concluded in a scathing engineering analysis last year. That’s more than NASA can afford. By the end of this month, it and ESA are supposed to find a cheaper way to achieve Mars sample return — or risk leaving the carefully collected rocks where they are.

Adding to the drama, Perseverance’s planners are debating what other science the rover should do before it has to stop exploring. The original mission plan was to explore the ancient river delta and then drive up out of the crater — where there are even older rocks that could tell scientists more about the history of Mars. But as Perseverance approaches Jezero’s rim (see ‘Epic journey’), some engineers are advocating for it to turn around and wait at a lower altitude, where it might be safer and cheaper to pick up the samples.

EPIC JOURNEY. Map shows route of the Perseverance rover which has been exploring the Jezero Crater on Mars for 3 years.

Source: Nature adaptation from NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL/Brown University

John Mustard, a planetary scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, wants the rover to stick to the original plan. The rocks currently on board are “great, but they’re not sufficient to be the transformative samples that we want them to be”, he says. “They’re not Apollo-scale,” he adds, referring to the Moon rocks collected by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and 1970s that revolutionized scientific understanding of the Moon and Earth.

He and other scientists pressed the case for exiting the crater last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. All eyes are now on NASA to see what it decides.

“Right now what we can say is, we’re committed to [Mars sample return] being the best value,” says Lindsay Hays, acting lead scientist for Mars sample return at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. “My focus is really on making sure that we get as much science out of what we can get.”

A long quest

NASA has been working on various concepts for bringing rocks back from Mars since the 1980s. Perseverance, the fifth in a string of increasingly sophisticated Mars rovers from the agency, landed in Jezero in 2021 to maximize scientists’ chances of finding signs of past life, if it ever existed. Jezero was once filled with water: a river flowed into it that created an ancient delta similar to those on Earth, which can preserve organic material — usually the remnants of plants and other organisms that came from upstream.

So far, Perseverance hasn’t spotted any obvious signs of ancient life, such as fossils, with its cameras. The best chance of finding past Martian life would be to analyse the rocks the rover has collected for materials rich in carbon, including organic compounds, that might have been created by the decay of long-dead organisms, says Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. This analysis would need to happen on Earth.

Two of the rock cores are particularly promising for this; they are fine-grained mudstones from the delta that could have trapped organic material. Other cores collected by Perseverance include once-molten rocks from the crater floor that could be analysed to determine the age of that region; sedimentary rocks from the river delta that hold a history of how Mars’s climate and habitability changed through time; and rocks from the delta’s edges that appear to have interacted with deep groundwater, another potentially habitable environment, for long periods.

Stay or go?

The rover is currently exploring a narrow band of rock near the crater’s rim that is rich in carbonate minerals. On Earth, carbonates commonly form along lake shorelines and can preserve evidence of life. But scientists are still debating whether Jezero’s band represents an ancient shoreline.

In the coming months, the rover will roll onto the rim; after that, the question is whether it will leave the crater. If so, it would explore ‘basement’ rocks from around 4 billion years ago — older than the 3.5-billion-year-old delta — and fossilized hydrothermal vents that could have been a haven for Martian life.

Image of a rock sample collected by NASA's Mars Perseverance rover.

When Perseverance drills a rock core such as this one, collected in October 2023, with its robotic arm, it then seals the specimen in a sample tube for safekeeping.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

But going to this region, known as Nili Planum, might involve more risk than NASA is now willing to take. One concern is that Nili Planum is several hundred metres higher than the crater floor, so the atmosphere above it is thinner, making it more difficult — and expensive — for a sample-retrieval mission to land there.

Scientists are also concerned about how much farther the rover can physically roll before it gives out. Perseverance has travelled nearly 25 kilometres since landing, but mission scientists think it might be able to cover another 70–90 kilometres. If this is confirmed by testing at JPL, it might be able to reach some of Nili Planum’s most intriguing rocks, which are around 16 kilometres from the rover’s current location, and then make it back into the crater for pick up. If Perseverance does die unexpectedly, it has already left a backup collection of ten cores on the floor of Jezero Crater.

Budget constraints

Now the focus turns to money and how much NASA can invest in bringing the samples back. The mission is part of NASA’s planetary sciences portfolio, which currently spends $2.7 billion annually.

NASA has said it doesn’t want to spend more than 35% of its budget on the mission to retrieve the samples in any given year. “Whatever we implement for Mars sample return is going to be done in the context of a balanced planetary science portfolio,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary sciences division, told the conference. But the uncertainty about how much funding might be available to work on Mars sample return forced JPL to lay off 8% of its employees last month.

Much of the cost for Mars sample return comes from its complexity. According to current plans, NASA would build a lander to retrieve the samples and a rocket to carry them off the surface to orbit Mars. ESA would contribute a spacecraft that would capture the samples in Mars orbit and transfer them to Earth. ESA has not discussed its budget for Mars sample return as publicly as NASA has, but European planetary scientists have expressed “consistent and strong science support” for the programme, says Gerhard Kminek, ESA’s lead scientist for Mars sample return in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

If NASA and ESA can figure out a path forwards, the rock collection would touch down on Earth no earlier than 2033. Meanwhile, the agencies have competition: China has announced plans to return Mars rocks to Earth at around the same time.

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A fresh start for the African Academy of Sciences

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Lise Korsten and Peggy Oti-Boateng in a meeting

Lise Korsten (left) and Peggy Oti-Boateng are steering the African Academy of Sciences’ new strategy.Credit: AAS Kenya

“We have a renewed mission,” the executive director of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS), Peggy Oti-Boateng, proudly declared at the launch of the academy’s strategic plan on 29 February. “In our previous mission, we were leveraging our resources, but now we want to leverage science, technology and innovation for sustainable development on the continent.” As AAS president Lise Korsten told Nature: “We want to really pitch ourselves as a global academy, representing the voice of African scientists.”

For the AAS, it is an important, welcome and timely step forwards, and hopefully the start of a new chapter in its near 40-year existence.

It comes after a difficult episode in the AAS’s history. The academy, which is based in Nairobi, is a pan-African fellowship society — modelled on many academies around the world. Its founding members included the late Kenyan entomologist Thomas Odhiambo, founding head of the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology, and Sudanese mathematician Mohamed Hassan, formerly president of TWAS, the World Academy of Sciences. Some 30 years after its creation, in 2015, the AAS, the African Union and international funders, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK biomedical charity Wellcome, agreed that the academy would host and manage a research-funding platform on behalf of these funders.

The AAS secretariat grew from a body with 19 staff members in 2014 managing a budget of around US$5 million a year, to one with more than 60 staff, distributing more than $250 million per year in health- and biomedical-research grants. In 2021, following internal tensions at the academy and the suspension of a few senior staff members, the funders withdrew, saying that they had lost confidence in the AAS’s governance systems. Much of this played out in public, putting the academy’s reputation at risk.

In fairness, the academy should not have been put in that position in the first place. Scientific academies are not generally set up to function as large-scale funding agencies. Their role tends to be to recognize their country’s researchers through fellowships and awards, represent the interests of science to governments and, where needed, advise policymakers. Part of their strength comes from being a trusted body of experts. This means they should also not align themselves — or be perceived to be aligning themselves — with external organizations. Many AAS fellows had voiced concerns along these lines.

In addition to the latest plan, the academy now has a fresh leadership and governing council. Oti-Boateng, a Ghanaian biochemist who was formerly a science adviser at the United Nations education, science and cultural organization UNESCO, works with Korsten, a South African food-security researcher who is the AAS’s first female president.

The plan is set to run until 2027, and has five areas of focus: environmental and climate change; health and well-being; natural sciences; policy and governance; and social sciences and humanities. Making improvements in these areas is a priority not only for African countries, but also for nations globally.

Looking ahead

This strategy could not have come at a more important time. Last year, the African Union joined the G20, a group of the world’s largest economies. Scientists meet through the S20, a network of G20 scientific academies, to discuss global challenges and also specific issues of concern to the scientific community. Before the African Union joined the G20, South Africa was the continent’s sole official representative in G20 bodies. By contrast, Europe’s researchers have representation from the academies of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, as well as Academia Europaea, a pan-European academy headquartered in London. The AAS, along with individual countries’ science academies, represented by the Network of African National Academies, is contributing to events leading up to year’s G20 summit, to be held in July in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The meeting agenda includes combating climate change and achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The AAS’s plan also involves attracting scientists in the African diaspora as members. For decades, the continent has haemorrhaged scientists to Europe and North America, and the AAS’s leadership wants to promote researcher and student links between diaspora scientists and colleagues working on the continent. “We have lost a group of young academics who should have now been leaders on the continent, the professors of the future — and maybe we can partially bring them back,” says Korsten. At the same time, broadening the membership should help to strengthen the academy’s finances, which would reduce its reliance on governments and philanthropic donors. The AAS is funded mainly by membership fees paid by its roughly 460 fellows, as well as from the interest from a $5-million endowment fund given to the academy by the Nigerian government in 2001. Other sources include mobility grants from external organizations and money from the European Union African Research Initiative for Scientific Excellence programme, which supports early- and mid-career researchers in dozens of African countries.

The academy has been through some hard times since 2021. It has learnt important lessons and is embarking on an important new phase. All of us who support science in Africa should support the academy, and be a supportive, critical friend to the academy as it strives to achieve its goals.

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scientists use AI to design antibodies from scratch

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Illustration of antibodies (pale pink) attacking influenza viruses.

Antibodies (pink) bind to influenza virus proteins (yellow) (artist’s conception).Credit: Juan Gaertner/Science Photo Library

Researchers have used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help them make completely new antibodies for the first time.

The proof-of-principle work, reported this week in a preprint on bioRxiv1, raises the possibility of bringing AI-guided protein design to the therapeutic antibody market, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Antibodies — immune molecules that strongly attach to proteins implicated in disease — have conventionally been made using brute-force approaches that involve immunizing animals or screening vast numbers of molecules.

AI tools that can shortcut those costly efforts have the potential to “democratize the ability to design antibodies”, says study co-author Nathaniel Bennett, a computational biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Ten years from now, this is how we’re going to be designing antibodies.”

“It’s a really promising piece of research” that represents an important step in applying AI protein-design tools to making new antibodies, says Charlotte Deane, an immuno-informatician at the University of Oxford, UK.

Making mini proteins

Bennett and his colleagues used an AI tool that their team released last year2 that has helped to transform protein design. The tool, called RFdiffusion, allows researchers to design mini proteins that can strongly attach to another protein of choice. But these custom proteins bear no resemblance to antibodies, which recognize their targets by way of floppy loops that have proved difficult to model with AI.

To overcome this, a team co-led by computational biophysicist David Baker and computational biochemist Joseph Watson, both at the University of Washington, modified RFdiffusion. The tool is based on a neural network similar to those used by image-generating AIs such as Midjourney and DALL·E. The team fine-tuned the network by training it on thousands of experimentally determined structures of antibodies attached to their targets, as well as real-world examples of other antibody-like interactions.

Using this approach, the researchers designed thousands of antibodies that recognize specific regions of several bacterial and viral proteins — including those that the SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses use to invade cells — and a cancer drug target. They then made a subset of their designs in the laboratory and tested whether the molecules could bind to the right targets.

Watson says that about one in 100 antibody designs worked as hoped — a lower success rate than the team now achieves with other types of AI-designed protein. The researchers determined the structure of one of the influenza antibodies, using a technique called cryo-electron microscopy, and found that it recognized the intended portion of the target protein.

Early proof of principle

A handful of companies are already using generative AI to help develop antibody drugs. Baker and Watson’s team hopes that RFdiffusion can help to tackle drug targets that have proved challenging, such as G-protein coupled receptors — membrane proteins that help to control a cell’s responses to external chemicals.

But the antibodies that RFdiffusion churned out are a long way from reaching the clinic. The designer antibodies that did work didn’t bind to their targets particularly strongly. Any antibody used therapeutically would also need its sequences modified to resemble natural human antibodies so as not to provoke an immune reaction.

The designs are also what’s known as single-domain antibodies, which resemble those found in camels and sharks, rather than the more complex proteins that nearly all approved antibody drugs are based on. These types of antibody are easier to design and simpler to study in the lab, and it makes sense to design these first, says Deane. “But this doesn’t take away from it being a step on the way to the kinds of methods we need.”

“This is proof-of-principle work,” Watson stresses. But he hopes this initial success will pave the way for designing antibody drugs at touch of a button. “It feels like quite a landmark moment. It really shows this is possible.”

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Memories from when you were a baby might not be gone

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Brown Skua, Stercorarius antarcticus, calling in front of a King Penguin colony.

Avian flu has been detected sub-Antarctic king penguins.Credit: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty

Some researchers in Antarctica are halting work after the global spread of deadly H5N1 avian influenza finally reached the continent. Bird flu was detected on the Antarctic mainland for the first time last month, in dead skuas (Stercorarius antarcticus). Spanish and Argentine research projects into vulnerable birds, seals and penguins have been suspended to reduce the risk of researchers spreading infection — or becoming infected themselves.

Nature | 4 min read

The most comprehensive report to date of compounds in plastic has found a laundry list of hazardous ingredients. Of more than 16,000 chemicals found in plastics or thought to be used in them, at least 4,200 are “persistent, bioaccumulative, mobile and/or toxic”, according to a group funded by the Norwegian Research Council. For more than 10,000 chemicals no hazard data were available, and for more than 9,000 there was no publicly available information about which plastics they are used in. The report’s authors argue for a ‘red list’ of 3,600 concerning compounds that should be regulated.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: PlastChem Project report

Patients with a deadly type of brain cancer called glioblastoma saw their tumours shrink following CAR-T therapy, a treatment based on modifying a patient’s own immune cells to target proteins in the cancer. These are early results from two small studies, and in many cases the tumours grew back, but it suggests the treatment has promise. The goal now is to generate longer-lasting responses. “It lends credence to the potential power of CAR-T cells to make a difference in solid tumours, especially the brain,” says neurosurgeon Bryan Choi, lead author of one of the studies. CAR T cells are currently only approved for treating blood cancers, such as leukaemia.

Nature | 4 min read

References: New England Journal of Medicine paper and Nature Medicine paper

The US has approved the first drug to treat an obesity-linked liver disease that affects an estimated 5% of the world’s adults. Resmetirom, to be marketed as Rezdiffra, treats metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) — formerly known as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). After many earlier drug failures, resmetirom is the first to reduce scar tissue known as fibrosis in the liver. But researchers caution that evidence for long-term benefits is still needed. “Only time will tell,” says gastroenterologist Maya Balakrishnan. “In the end, what matters is: does this drug improve survival?”

Nature | 4 min read

A ‘hurrah moment’: go deeper into the development and approval of resmetirom in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (10 min read)

Features & opinion

People have no memories from before about three years old, and no one knows why. “It’s a paradox in a sense,” says neuroscientist Flavio Donato. “In the moment that the brain is learning at a rate it will never show again during the whole lifetime, those memories seem not to stick in the brain.” New research suggests that maybe those memories aren’t gone after all — we just can’t consciously access them. Scientists are swapping lab rats and mazes for playrooms and plush toys to reveal what’s going on inside tiny tots’ heads.

Science | 12 min read

A trio of experienced scientists has put together a project-prioritizing checklist to help early-career researchers from being pulled in too many directions. They suggest rating each project on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) on the following points:

• The project is with people I trust to be good scientists

• I look forward to meetings with my project collaborators

• The topic of the project is interesting to me

• The project fits with my desired professional identity

• Data collection for the project is going well

• The results seem to be robust

Disregard any projects that score a 1 in any category and charge ahead with those with the highest score.

Nature | 5 min read

In Journeys of Black Mathematicians, film maker George Csicsery reveals how Black scholars shaped today’s US mathematics community and provides hope for the future. “It is wonderful to learn about successes in academia and industry,” writes Black mathematician Noelle Sawyer in her review. “The question that needs to be asked now is which spaces are worth entering.” Furthering representation should not mean doing morally questionable work, such as creating weapons, argues Sawyer. “Pushing back against the inequities of the past and present should not include contributing to the oppression of others.”

Nature | 6 min read

Watch Journeys of Black Mathematicians online

Feeling scared or overwhelmed about the future of our warming planet is now part of the human condition, says atmospheric scientist Adam Sobel. The greatest harm of climate change, Sobel says, comes from its role as a ‘threat multiplier’ — for example, contributing to democratic backsliding. “The important thing is to remain engaged,” he says, for example by voting for politicians who push forward the clean-energy transition. Scientists can also orient their research more towards supporting climate-adaptation planning. “Maybe a more pragmatic and constructive question than ‘how doomed are we?’ is ‘what should we do about it?’”

Nature | 10 min read

Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes a fascinating account of ophthalmology and life with vision impairment and a witty cogitation on how robots learnt languages.

Nature | 4 min read

Infographic of the week

Annual review. A stacked percentage bar chart showing the breakdown of productive hours spent on areas such as teaching and research.

Throughout her first year on the tenure track, psychologist Megan Rogers tracked all of her productive activities in 30-minute increments. Her key takeaways were that working more than 45 hours a week was unsustainable, tasks often took longer than expected, having a non-working life didn’t make her less productive and it’s OK for focus to ebb and flow over time. If you want to try out time tracking, you can download Rogers’ Microsoft Excel template. (Nature | 6 min read)

Quote of the day

Neuroscientist Susan Rogers, who started off her career as Prince’s audio engineer, says that musicians and scientists have more in common than one might guess — both need to be open-minded and to be able to separate relevant and irrelevant information. (Nature | 10 min read)

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