NAB
At the start of the pandemic the scientific and medical community came together
to train their R&D on one global problem, in the process pushing
researchers into new forms of rapid communication and collaboration.
article here
The results are a benefit to all of us: a rapid
understanding of the virus and its potential mutations on which governments
based mass health measures, and a sequencing of the COVID genome, which led to
vaccines.
These efforts also had the side effect of showing just what
can be achieved if resources are pooled and targeted.
“The scale of cooperation and collaboration is
staggering,” Joseph Bak-Coleman, postdoctoral fellow at the University of
Washington Center for an Informed Public, and Carl Bergstrom, professor of
biology at the University of Washington, write in Scientific American.
“Scientists with scant experience in public communication
learned to work closely with journalists, informing a worried public about what
was happening, what to expect next and what people could do to keep themselves
safe,” the authors note.
Large-scale surveys of scientists in 2020 and 2021, as
reported in Nature, reveal that roughly a third of researchers in the U.S.
and Europe contributed to the effort.
This was a multi-disciplinary all-hands on deck moment.
Biologists joined forces with virologists and immunologists to focus on the new
pathogen. Economists, physicists, engineers, statisticians, psychologists,
sociologists, and more — dropped everything to learn about COVID and figure out
how they could contribute.
“The urgency of COVID drove scientists to adapt. Discussions
that previously took place at conferences, on the telephone or in revision
notes on manuscripts moved to social media platforms, review sites such as
PubPeer and all-hours Zoom rooms. Researchers and clinicians spontaneously
organized into focused teams and working groups.”
Most of the time science is a slow and tedious business.
Traditional modes of publication and peer review were far too slow for this
crisis.
“We embraced a rapid alternative model: preprint archives,
where papers are posted prior to peer review or consideration at a scientific
journal.”
The number of papers submitted to medRxiv, a key repository
of biomedical preprints, increased ten-fold in the first few months of the pandemic.
“These changes also shifted early-stage science from a
private activity to part of the public discourse,” observe Bak-Coleman and
Bergstrom. “Instead of presenting the world with polished scientific articles,
investigators worked in open view, thinking aloud, offering preliminary
speculations, arguing, making wrong turns, following dead ends and pursuing
some hypotheses that would ultimately be refuted.”
There were some downsides. For instance, “flawed
blood-sample research” reported in an April 2020 medRxiv paper purported
to show that COVID was a mild disease with a very low fatality rate.
Although the scientific community quickly pointed out a host
of problems with the work, “people seeking to avoid business restrictions,
school closures and mask mandates ignored the criticism and used the paper to
undermine public health interventions,” say Bak-Coleman and Bergstrom.
Rapid and unorthodox channels of communication also could
not solve all the problems scientists encountered. Most critically, the
scientific community has been largely unsuccessful at anticipating and managing
the human element of the pandemic.
“A collective failure to stop misinformation from spreading
on social and traditional media platforms has left large segments of the
population unvaccinated, vulnerable and unwilling to embrace measures such as masks
and social distancing.”
However, the ability to tackle and find solutions (in form
of vaccine) in astonishingly quick time has shown how the world can harness
expertise if it unites to organize, learn and coordinate.
Missing from this paper by the scientists is the financial
motivation — profiteering, by another name — among certain medical research and
PPE sales/distribution companies, which also contributed to shortening the
pandemic’s lifespan, but not for altruistic reasons.
The capacity of the hive mind in action has led to calls for
it to be trained on other major universal health issues such as curing cancer
or Alzheimer’s disease.
Surely there is no more pressing emergency than climate
change, which only collective action can solve. In the book Ministry of
the Future, author Kim Stanley Robinson imagines how the world might form an
international taskforce to tackles global heating. It involves both large scale
geo-engineering projects drilling into the arctic ice and the vital
contributions of the world’s banking community who have to be cajoled into
replacing the existing financial system with blockchain tracked Carbon coins
that derive value from carbon reduction.
This is the type of big thinking that can and should be
happening, especially since it’s within our power to do so.
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