Matt Ridley's Blog, page 12

We all need to change how we live our lives to fight this generation of pandemics

My article for The Telegraph:

In the 19th century Ignaz Semmelweis was vilified and ostracised when he tried to make doctors wash their hands after doing autopsies on women who had died from childbirth fever before going straight upstairs to deliver more babies. We have come a long way since then in public health, but we can go much further still.

The Covid-19 coronavirus must change the way we behave – whether it kills millions or not. The vulnerability to pandemic-panic of world stock markets, the tourism industry, international sport and global trade, even before there is an actual pandemic, tells us that global society, for all its medical know-how, is vulnerable.

Pandemics are frankly more likely to kill millions or disrupt the world economy than climate change. But if we learn the lesson that we must be more authoritarian, we’ll have got it wrong. Culture and practice can change without putting Big Brother in charge.

Covid-19 may yet peter out, but it looks unlikely after what has happened in Italy and Iran. It seems to be killing mainly old people and its mortality and infectivity may eventually be no higher than flu, but that is cold comfort.

Flu kills thousands a year, yet we treat respiratory infections fatalistically as an inevitable risk, the way our ancestors thought of consumption or smallpox. It should not be like this: we can do much more to stop these viruses spreading.

China has apparently got Covid-19 under control with brutal measures: drones shouting at people in the street; violent arrests; and a total ban on travel.

This has gained admirers among the instinctively bossy. “China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the Covid-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response,” said the World Health Organisation this week.

There has long been a streak of China envy among those on the statist Left who yearn for authoritarian measures to bring in population control and renewable energy, bypassing inconveniences of democracy.

But autocracy has its drawbacks too. Lack of challenge from civil society allows live, wild animals to be sold in markets in China, providing a way for new viruses to jump into the human species. Besides, violent enforcement of public health would not survive legal and political challenge here and might prove counterproductive.

It should not be necessary anyway. Society is already reacting: conferences and rugby matches are being cancelled and people are self-isolating voluntarily. For those who refuse to go along (a doctor friend mentioned a patient who ignored advice not to board a connecting flight after falling ill on a flight from China), shame will be a powerful weapon.

I hope that what emerges from this episode is a cultural shift to change our habits so as to defeat not just future lethal diseases, but also ones as harmless as the common cold. It’s outrageous that we treat viruses as acts of God to be borne with patience, and mock as wimps those who stay at home.

It’s mad that we send our children to nurseries with runny noses where they amplify infections. It’s idiotic that many persist in believing you only get a cold because you’re “run down”, as if Louis Pasteur had never lived and the germ theory of disease was still up for discussion. It’s silly that people with colds go to parties and not only shake hands with but – increasingly, if they are under 30 – kiss strangers on first meeting.

A few weeks ago I had a bad cold so I delayed a trip to London, then refused to shake hands with anybody for 10 days. It was hard. People kept saying things like “Oh, I don’t get colds, I take vitamins”, or “I’ve had it already”, when there are 200 kinds of virus that cause the common cold and immunity is often temporary anyway.

Wearing a face mask when you have a cold or flu should become the norm as it is in Japan.

Let’s use this epidemic, however bad it gets, to change our habits not just temporarily but for good.

With 7.7  billion people on the planet, we are a very tempting target for new viruses and although we have interrupted many of the ways that they would like to spread, and are good at making vaccines, we are still subject to lots of respiratory infections that can occasionally kill us and will always inconvenience us.

We don’t need Big Brother to force cultural change on us; better that we do it voluntarily.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my newsletter! My new book How Innovation Works is coming May 2020, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

The Brexit boost for British bio-science

My article for The Critic:

Britain is really good at biology. In physics and chemistry, or painting and music, we have often failed to match the Germans, the French or the Italians. But in the bio-sciences, nobody can equal us. Here’s an astonishing list of firsts that happened on this damp island: William Harvey and the circulation of the blood. Robert Hooke and the cell. Edward Jenner and vaccines. Charles Darwin and natural selection. Alexander Fleming and antibiotics. Francis Crick and James Watson (and Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins) and the structure of DNA. Fred Sanger and DNA sequencing. Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards and the first test-tube baby. Alec Jeffreys and DNA fingerprinting. Ian Wilmut and Dolly the Sheep. The biggest single contribution to the sequencing of the human genome (the Wellcome Trust).

Annoyingly, the exciting new tool of genome editing is the one that got away. The best of the new tools, known as CRISPR, emerged from the work of a Spaniard, Francisco Mojica, who first spotted some odd sequences in a microbe’s genome that seemed to be part of a toolkit for defeating viruses. Then a few years ago French, American, Finnish, Dutch and Chinese scientists turned this insight into a device for neatly snipping out specific sequences of DNA from a genome in any species, opening up the prospect of neatly rewriting DNA to prevent disease or alter crops. Two American universities are squabbling over the patents (and Nobel prize hopes). Further improvements are coming thick and fast.

But we are well placed to catch up with superb labs straining at the leash to apply these new tools. The biggest immediate opportunity is in agriculture, and here leaving the European Union is absolutely key. There is no clearer case of a technology in which we will be held back if we do not break free from the EU approach. It would not be a race to the bottom in terms of safety and environmental standards, but the very opposite: a race to the top.

For example, if we allowed the genetically modified blight-resistant potatoes that have been developed at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norfolk to be grown in fields here in the UK, we would be able to greatly reduce the spraying of fungicides on potato fields, which at present happens up to 15 times a year, harming biodiversity and causing lots of emissions from tractors. That would be a big improvement, not a regression, in environmental terms. But at the moment commercialising the Sainsbury Lab potato is in practice impossible because of onerous EU rules.

Other countries are already dashing ahead with the new technology. Last year a review of the patenting of CRISPR products in agriculture found that, whereas America had taken out 872 patent families and China 858, the European Union had taken out only 194. The gap is growing.

The reason is nothing to do with the quality of research in Europe. It is all about regulation. When genome editing first came along, the European Commission decided to delay for several years making up its mind about how to regulate the release of genome-edited organisms while it waited for the European Court of Justice to decide whether to treat this new technology as if it were like genetic modification (the process invented a generation ago for transferring genes between species) or a form of mutation breeding (the process invented two generations ago for randomly scrambling the genes of plants under gamma rays in the hopes of generating better varieties).

If it was like genetic modification, then it would be subject to draconian rules that amount to a de-facto ban. Nobody even tries to commercialise a GMO crop in Europe any more because you enter a maze of delay, obfuscation, uncertainty, expense and red tape from which you never emerge.

The result is that European agriculture is more dependent on chemical sprays than it would have otherwise been, as shown by research at Gottingen University: on average, GMOs have reduced the application of pesticides to crops wherever they have been grown by 37 per cent. So we have missed out on biological solutions and had to stick with chemical ones instead.

If on the other hand genome editing is like mutation breeding, then you can go ahead and plant a crop straight away here with no restrictions. This is, of course, mad, since mutation breeding is more likely (though still very unlikely) to produce an accidentally harmful result even than GMOs, but it’s an older technique and has been used for much of the food you eat, including organic food, and for some reason nobody at Greenpeace objects.

Brexit is a fantastic opportunity to do something no European continental competitor is allowed to

Genome editing is an even more precise and predictable technique than GMOs. It involves no transfer of foreign DNA and the incision is made at a specific location in a genome, not at random. It is clearly the safest of all these three techniques, and so said the European Court’s advocate general in his advice to the court. But in July 2018 the ECJ, being a political entity, decided otherwise and told the commission what it wanted to hear, that it should treat genome-edited plants and animals as if they were GMOs.

There was fury and dismay throughout the laboratories of Europe. There would have been more in Britain if academics had not feared playing into the hands of Brexiteers while remaining was still a possibility. A Canadian biotech professor tweeted that this was a good day for Canada since it removed a competitor continent from the scene. The absurdity is illustrated by the fact that in some cases it is impossible to distinguish a genome-edited variety from a variety bred by hybridisation or lucky selection with the same trait. Stefan Jansson from Umeå University in Sweden put it like this: “Common sense and scientific logic says that it is impossible to have two identical plants where growth of one is, in reality, forbidden while the other can be grown with no restrictions; how would a court be able to decide if the cultivation was a crime or not?”

Brexit therefore offers a fantastic opportunity to do something no European continental competitor is effectively allowed to do, and that will benefit the environment. We have great laboratories here, in Norwich, Nottingham, Rothamsted and Edinburgh among other places. But the private sector of plant biotechnology is all but extinct in Britain and will take some jump-starting.

Twenty years ago there were 480 full-time equivalent, PhD-level, private sector jobs in agricultural biotechnology in this country. Today there are just ten. That is what has happened to that whole sector in this country as a result of the misinformed and misguided green campaign against GMOs. Until politicians signal a sea change, the private sector will shun the UK’s wonderful labs and the breakthroughs will be applied overseas, if at all.

As a new online tool called the Global Gene Editing Regulation Tracker has shown, America, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Japan and much of the rest of the world are moving towards a nimbler and more rational regulatory approach: namely judging a crop not by the method used to produce it, but by the traits it possesses. If you can make a potato resistant to blight, what matters is whether the potato is safe, not whether it was made by conventional breeding, gamma-ray mutagenesis or genome editing.

In the EU, if you made this potato by gamma-ray mutation breeding, scrambling its DNA at random in a nuclear reactor, the regulations would say: “No problem. Go ahead and plant it.” If you made it by the far more precise method of genome editing, in which you know exactly what you have done and have confined your activities to one tiny bit of DNA, you are plunged into a Kafkaesque labyrinth of regulatory indecision and expense. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, on which I sit, recommended we switch to regulation by trait, a few years back but it was not possible before Brexit.

Genome editing can bring not just environmental benefits but animal welfare benefits too. In 2017, scientists at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh announced that they had genome-edited pigs to protect them against a virus called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, PRRS. They used CRISPR to cut out a short section from the pig gene that made the protein through which the virus gained access to cell. The change therefore denied the virus entry. They did this without altering the function of the protein made by the gene, so the animal grew up to be normal in every way except that it was immune to the disease.

This means less vaccination, less medication and less suffering. What is not to like? (Incredibly, when I mentioned this case in a speech in the House of Lords, a Green Party peer objected that eradicating a disease that causes suffering in pigs might be a bad thing in case it allows a change in pig husbandry techniques. Even Marie Antoinette was never quite that callous.) But commercialising that animal in the UK is currently all but impossible until we change the rules.

Genome-editing technology could revolutionise conservation as well as agriculture. Looking far ahead into much more speculative science, the same scientists at the Roslin who made the virus-resistant pigs are now looking into how to control grey squirrels not by killing them, as we do now, but by using genome editing to spread infertility infectiously through the population, so that the population slowly declines while squirrels live happily into old age.

This technique, called gene drive, could transform the practice of conservation all around the world, especially the control of invasive alien species — the single greatest cause of extinction among birds and mammals today. We could eliminate the introduced mosquitos on Hawaii whose malaria is slowly exterminating the native honeycreeper birds. We could get rid of the non-native rats and goats on the Galapagos which are destroying the habitat of tortoises and birds.

We could get rid of the signal crayfish from America that have devastated many British rivers. For those who worry that gene drive might run riot, there is a simple answer: it can and will be designed in each case to last for a certain number of generations, not forever. And it will be wholly species-specific, so it cannot affect, say, the native red squirrel.

Genome editing may one day allow the de-extinction of the great auk

Still more futuristically, genome editing may one day allow the de-extinction of the great auk and the passenger pigeon. To achieve this, we need to take four steps: to sequence the DNA of an extinct species, which we have done in the case of the great auk; to edit the genome of a closely related species in ​the lab, which is not yet possible but may not be far off as genome editing techniques improve by leaps and bounds; to turn a cell into an adult animal, which is difficult, but possible through primordial germ cell transfer, again pioneered at the Roslin Institute; and to train the adults for living in the wild, which is hard work but possible.

Genome editing is also going to have implications for human medicine. Here the European Union is less of a problem, and home-grown regulation is already in good shape: cautious and sensibly applied under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Britain has already licensed the first laboratory experiments, at the Crick Institute, on the use of genome editing in human embryos, but this is for research into infertility, not for making designer babies.

There is universal agreement that germ-line gene editing to produce human beings with new traits must remain off-limits and be considered in future only for the elimination of severe disease, not for the enhancement of normal talents. This view is shared around the world: the Chinese rogue scientist He Jiankui, who claims he used CRISPR to make two babies HIV-resistant from birth, was sentenced to three years in prison last December.

In practice, fears about designer babies are somewhat exaggerated. The same issue comes up about once a decade with every new breakthrough in biotechnology. It was raised about artificial insemination in the 1970s, about in-vitro fertilisation in the 1980s, about cloning in the 1990s and about gene sequencing in the 2000s. Indeed, it has been possible to choose or selectively implant sperm, eggs and embryos with particular genes for a long time now and yet demand remains stubbornly low.

Most people do not want to use IVF or sperm donation to have the babies of clever or athletic people, as they easily could, but to have their own babies: the technology has been used almost exclusively as a cure for infertility. Indeed, the more we find out about genomes, the harder it becomes to imagine anybody wanting to, let alone being able to, enhance specific traits in future children by fiddling with genes: there are just too many genes, each with only very small effects, interacting with each other in the creation of any particular behaviour or ability.

Imagine walking into a doctor’s clinic and being presented with a catalogue of expensive genetic changes that could be made to your future baby’s genes, each of which might have a tiny and uncertain effect. The truth is most people do not want to have especially clever or sporty offspring: they want children like themselves.

However, in contrast to germ-line gene editing, somatic genome editing will play a large part in medicine. It is already happening, for example in a process known as CAR-T cell therapy, in which an immune cell is genome-edited so that it will attack a specific tumour, then multiplied and injected back into the body as a form of live drug. If we encourage genome editing in Britain we will be in a position to cure some cancers, enhance agricultural yield, improve the nutrient quality of food, protect crops from pests without using chemicals, eradicate animal diseases, enhance animal welfare, encourage biodiversity and maybe bring back the red squirrel. If we do not, then China, America, Japan and Argentina will still push ahead with this technology and will follow their own priorities, leaving us as supplicants to get the technology second-hand.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my newsletter! My new book How Innovation Works is coming May 2020, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

Officially Introducing My Latest Book, "How Innovation Works"

My next book How Innovation Works will be published on 14th May in the United Kingdom and 19th May in the United States and Canada. It’s available for pre-order now. While it has been searchable on booksellers’ websites for a few months, and teased here and there on social media, I am glad to be introducing it officially and directly to you, my friends and fans, for the first time.

At some point in the year or two after The Evolution of Everything came out – I remember the moment, but not when it was exactly – the idea hit me rather abruptly that innovation is both one of the most significant human habits and one of the least well understood. I had touched on a lot of aspects of innovation in my previous books, but I have never tackled it head on.

But what is innovation, and why does it happen? After all no other species experiences much if at all, and we did not experience it much until a few centuries ago. Yet now it’s everywhere. This is what I say in the introduction:

Innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance–and that happen to be useful… [It] means finding new ways to apply energy to create improbable things, and see them catch on. It means much more than invention, because the word implies developing an invention to the point where it catches on because it is sufficiently practical, affordable, reliable and ubiquitous to be worth using…

In the pages that follow I will trace the path of ideas from the invention to the innovation, through the long struggle to get an idea to catch on, usually by combining it with other ideas. And here is my starting point: innovation is the most important fact about the modern world, but one of the least well understood. It is the reason most people today live lives of prosperity and wisdom compared with their ancestors, the overwhelming cause of the great enrichment of the past few centuries, the simple explanation of why the incidence of extreme poverty is in global freefall for the first time in history: from 50 per cent of the world population to 9 per cent in my lifetime.

The striking thing about innovation is how mysterious it still is. No economist or social scientist can fully explain why innovation happens, let alone why it happens when and where it does. In this book I shall try to tackle this great puzzle.

Here is how I tried to tackle it.

Chapters

I took my own advice and wrote the book in a bottom up fashion, mostly in the form of stories, digging into the details of how important innovations came about, and into the lives of those who did the most to make them happen. This allowed me to tell their stories, and let my conclusions emerge and evolve through example, maybe even through trial and error. By the time I came to write the chapter on “innovation’s essentials”, I had a longish list of lessons I had learned.

The first chapters cover innovation in four of the most important fields of human endeavour⁠: Energy, Public Health, Transport, and Food⁠. I start with what I think is probably the most important event in human history, the somewhat mysterious story of the breakthrough that made the Industrial Revolution possible: namely the harnessing of heat to do work. That’s the steam engine.

I then look at three special cases, Low-Tech Innovation, Communications and Computing, and Prehistoric Innovation, before drawing together the insights in two chapters on the general features of innovation, and the economic theory of how it changes the world.

The final three chapters cover the darker side of innovation – Fakes, Frauds, Fads, and Failure; Resistance to Innovation; and An Innovation Famine – before an ultimately cheery ending about how I believe innovation can be saved. I deliberately don’t say much about the future course of innovation, because I argue that it is essentially unpredictable.

Although there are too many great innovations to cover all of them, I hope the book provides a broad and comprehensive exploration of the topic – from steam engines to search engines, from vaccines to vaping, from dogs to mosquito nets. I wrote it to appeal to those enthusiastic about innovation policy, to those hoping to benefit from innovation and to those hoping to cause or create innovation. And if only one of those applies to you, I hope that by the time you're finished, one of the others does as well.

What’s Next

I am very excited about How Innovation Works, and think it has the potential to be not only my best book, but also my best seller. That’s where you come in.

Over the next three months leading up to the launch of the book in May, I will be recording the audio edition of the book, writing articles about it, giving interviews and doing online engagements as well as honing my elevator pitch. The days when you waited till the book was out before talking about it are over, so I’ll be building up to publication steadily.

And while it isn't yet available to read, it is available to buy. Pre-orders, especially for hardcover copies from traditional booksellers, have a larger than normal impact on bestseller lists and other factors that impact a book's success. So if you're planning to buy it, and want it do well, please consider pre-ordering, then bragging about it to your friends on Facebook and Twitter or whatever is the latest social media innovation coming soon.

I also hope to release the introduction for free download in the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe to the newsletter below in order to be notified when it drops.

Thank you so much for all of your help, support, and kind words over the last several months as I increase my activity online and elsewhere. While interacting with fans on social media is an innovation I have been somewhat slow to, it is one I have enjoyed very much.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my newsletter below! My new book How Innovation Works is coming May 2020, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

What Boris Johnson Should Know About Innovation

My blog post for Free Market Conservatives:

When you think about it, what has happened to human society in the last 300 years is pretty weird. After trundling along with horses and sailboats, slaves and swords, for millennia, we suddenly got steam engines and search engines, and planes and cars and electricity and computers and social media and DNA sequences. We gave ourselves a perpetual motion machine called innovation. The more we innovated, the more innovation became possible.

It’s by far the biggest story of the last three centuries—the main cause of the decline of extreme poverty to unprecedented levels—yet we know curiously little about why it happened, let alone when and where and how it can be made to continue. It certainly did not start as a result of deliberate policy. Even today, beyond throwing money at scientists in the hope they might start businesses, and subsidies at businesses in the hope they might deliver products, we don’t have much of an idea how to encourage innovation at the political level.

What’s more, free-market economists have been in a special muddle about innovation for a long time. The economics profession spent a couple of centuries assuming that markets tend towards equilibria, through the invisible hand. Hence John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes and pretty well everybody else in between assumed that we would see diminishing returns come to dominate human endeavour. But instead we experienced increasing returns, accelerating invention. As the author David Warsh put it in his book Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (2006) some years ago, economists obsessed about Adam Smith’s invisible hand but forgot about his pin factory, where specialisation led to innovation.

Now, thanks to people like Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer, the penny has finally dropped that there is an effectively infinite number of ways to rearrange the atoms and bits in the world into useful combinations, and that returns can increase forever. At the same time, people have spotted that the societies that do the most innovating are the ones with the most freedom for people to exchange ideas. It was freedom, not state direction, that caused both Victorian Britain and modern California to be hotbeds of innovation. It was state dirigisme that prevented Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and to a lesser extent Juncker’s Europe from being similar hotbeds. Necessity is not the mother of invention. Ambition is.

In my forthcoming book How Innovation Works I argue that the state rarely deserves the credit for sparking innovation: “Far more often inventions and discoveries emerge by serendipity and the exchange of ideas, and are pushed, pulled, moulded, transformed and brought to life by people acting as individuals, firms, markets and yes, sometimes public servants. Trying to pretend that government is the main actor in this process, let alone one with directed intentionality, is an essentially creationist approach to an essentially evolutionary phenomenon.” 

It’s vital that Boris Johnson’s government grasps the extra freedom we have just won by leaving an empire, to unleash innovation.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook. My new book How Innovation Works is coming May 2020, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

Why have so many of our recent viruses come from bats?

My article from The Spectator:

I’m no Nostradamus, but 20 years ago when I was commissioned to write a short book about disease in the new millennium, I predicted that if a new pandemic did happen it would be a virus, not a bacterium or animal parasite, and that we would catch it from a wild animal. ‘My money is on bats,’ I wrote. We now know that the natural host and reservoir of the new coronavirus, Covid-19, is a bat, and that the virus probably got into people via a live-animal market in Wuhan.

This is not the first disease bats have given us. Rabies possibly originated in bats. So did, and does, Ebola, outbreaks of which usually trace back to people coming into contact with bat roosts in caves, trees or buildings. Marburg virus, similar to Ebola, first killed people in Germany in 1967 and is now known to be a bat virus. Since 1994 Hendra virus has occasionally jumped from Australian fruit bats into horses and rarely people, with lethal effect. Since 1998 another fruit-bat virus, Nipah, has also infected and killed people mainly in India and Bangladesh. Sars, which originated in China in 2003, is derived from bats, though possibly via civet cats. So is Mers, a similar bat-borne coronavirus that’s killed hundreds of people and camels in the Middle East since 2012.

All these have high mortality but are not easily passed on from one person to another. Covid-19 is the opposite: highly contagious but rarely lethal. There is a good reason for this trade-off between infectivity and virulence, but it helps to think like a virus to understand it. On the whole, unless transmitted by insects, dirty water or sex, new diseases evolve towards lower virulence if they spread far.

The 200 or so different rhinoviruses, adenoviruses and coronaviruses that cause what we call ‘the common cold’ have a vested interest in not disabling us much, let alone killing us: they want us to struggle into work, coughing and sneezing, or turn up at parties, kissing and shaking hands. In this way, milder strains spread farther than fiercer ones and gradually displace them. Likewise, bats can ‘carry’ Covid-19 but not die.

By contrast, malaria wants us to lie down in a darkened room, delirious, so as to attract and not notice mosquitoes. Herpes, syphilis and HIV — the worst new animal-acquired infection of recent decades by far, caught from chimpanzees — like to subside for months or years in the hope that we move on to a new sexual partner. Evolution is a cunning foe.

Why are bats responsible for so many recent zoonoses (posh Greek for infections acquired from other animal species)? First, bats are mammals, which means they are sufficiently closely related to us for some of their viruses to thrive in our bodies. A virus that lives in a fish or a bird is less likely to be able to infect a human being, influenza being a rare exception, caught from ducks via pigs. Second, bats have never been domesticated. On the whole we have already caught the diseases of cows and pigs and dogs. Measles, smallpox, anthrax and tuberculosis were all gifts from our farmed animals.

Third, unlike most other mammals, bats live in huge flocks — just as we do. They therefore host viruses that spread by casual contact. Tigers meet so few other tigers and so rarely that they are hopeless hosts for ambitious viruses. Bracken Cave, in Texas, is home to roughly 20 million breeding Mexican free-tailed bats, similar to the (human) population of the Mexico City urban area. In places there are 500 bat pups per square foot on the wall. To a virus that represents a tasty buffet. But why now? That is easy to answer too. It’s not because of climate change or the destruction of forests. Bats have lived in belfries, as well as dead trees, for centuries. It’s because we now live at such high densities and travel so much. With 7.7 billion people on the planet, many of whom now travel long distances, we are a tempting target. As I wrote 20 years ago: ‘The rewards for a germ that colonised us would be immense. It would quickly become one of the most successful microbes in history.’ The chances are that plenty of people died of bat-borne infections in the past too, but the epidemic usually petered out because villages were small and long-distance travel was rare.

However, it seems bats probably did not give us Covid-19 directly. The virus’s sequence of RNA (DNA’s cousin) in human beings is 96 per cent the same as that found in a bat sampled in Yunnan in 2013 during the search for the origin of Sars. This implies that they share a common ancestor at least 25 years ago. By contrast, the pangolin version of the virus is 99 per cent similar to ours. Probably, captured pangolins, on sale in the live-animal market in Wuhan and mainly imported from Malaysia, had somehow caught the virus from bats. Pangolins are globally endangered because of demand from China.

Fortunately, the modern world not only makes us a tempting target for new diseases, it also gives us new tools to combat them. It took years to sequence the genome of HIV, weeks to sequence the genome of Sars and days for Covid-19. Our ability to diagnose the disease is therefore rapidly catching up, and the chances are that a vaccine will soon be available, while quarantine and strict self-isolation may yet keep the virus from going global. If it does, virulence will probably fall; not much comfort for those who do die, but meaning that the death of billions is unlikely.

In the meantime, please can we learn two obvious lessons? First, let’s stop bringing wild animals into markets alive (if at all): viruses do not survive long in dead bodies, even if not refrigerated. It’s a cruel practice anyway. And second, let’s keep our distance from bats. Definitely don’t eat them.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook. My new book How Innovation Works is coming May 2020, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

Questions and Answers from my reddit AMA

I visited reddit's r/IAmA community Wednesday to answer your questions. Here are some highlights.

Can you briefly summarise your position on climate change?

Yes, though it's not an issue I am focusing on much at the moment. My view is summarised in a lecture I gave in 2016 called Global Warming versus Global Greening. I've covered climate change for over 30 years since I was science and technology editor of the Economist. In that time my view has changed. I have always accepted that man-made climate change through CO2 emissions is real. I used to worry that it would prove very dangerous. Having seen it occur slower than was predicted in the first IPCC report in 1990, and have less effect on the frequency of droughts, floods and storms than was then predicted, and having seen estimates of climate sensitivity come down, I now think it is likely that it will be at the bottom of the range of possibilities considered by the IPCC, do relatively little harm at least for several decades, that there are other environmental problems we should be more concerned about, that the measures we are taking to combat it will in some cases do more environmental harm than good, and that the way to tackle it is to encourage innovation in energy systems while ensuring maximum prosperity to pay for adaptation and research.

While, as I said, it's not an issue I am focusing on much, I was happy to remind everyone of my position.

I am interested in many fields and disciplines both within and outside science, so I consider myself a generalist as opposed to a specialist. A piece of advice I like is that to make the world better stick to what you're good at and change what you can. As a generalist, if I want to make the world better, but don't want to stick to one specialty, how can I do that?

It is a good question, because I think human beings have achieved great things through specialisation accompanied by exchange: becoming narrower in what they produce and wider in what they consume. That's the main theme of human history in one reading. In that sense, doing what I do, which is to comment on and engage with several different areas of human endeavour is probably a mistake. One might achieve more by sticking to one thing. But you are only on the planet once; seems a shame to be too narrow! Actually I think I am fairly narrow, in that mostly I write and I speak - that is my specialisation.

Could you give your view on the precautionary principle in the context of innovation? At what level of safety assessment you would say we can declare an innovation with potentially huge consequences (e.g. GM crops, research in AI, etc.) safe enough?

This is a topic I am very interested in. One version of the precautionary principle is essential: better safe than sorry. However, as interpreted by the EU especially, another version has become essentially a device for preventing innovation often on behalf of incumbent interests. Here are the main problems with it: it holds the new to a higher standard than the old, demanding hazard-free innovations when they are replacing existing technologies that have huge hazards. For example, vaping is required to pass tests for toxicity that cigarette smoke is not; and, it ignores the benefits of an innovation, requiring authorities to consider only the hazards. Thus the fact that biotechnology has resulted in a lower reliance on chemicals in agriculture is not taken into account... If the precautionary principle had been in use during the invention of the motor car, that technology would never have been allowed because it brought several new hazards.
It needs to be balanced by an innovation principle in my view: that regulation must not deter or prevent potentially beneficial innovation. I strongly recommend the chapter about this in Ed Regis's new book on Golden Rice.

What made you choose innovation as the topic of your next book?

I have become increasingly fascinated by the topic of innovation. It's such a mysterious process, crucial to the modern world, but we have very little idea of why it happens when and where it does and to what technologies or institutions. I am always interested in mysteries and I decided to tackle this one head-on, having touched on it in my two previous books.

Considering the rise of Crispr, what is your opinion on designer babies?

We have been worried about those ever since the 1960s. First artificial insemination was going to cause people to choose designer babies; then in vitro fertilisation, then genetic testing; then cloning, then gene sequencing, now genome editing. It's largely a non problem for two reasons: 1. There is very little demand; unexpectedly people choose these technologies to have their own children rather than super-babies, and they like kinds that are like themselves. 2. The genetic determination of features like intelligence or musical ability is, we now know, achieved by thousands of genes working together, and it's highly impractical to pick one or two out. So crispr is going to be used to delete serious genetic disorders, not to enhance abilities, I think.

Thank you for all your questions! I answered about a dozen overall. For those who didn't get to ask one, I hope to visit again.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook. My new book How Innovation Works is coming May 2020, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

The Best Questions and Answers from my reddit AMA

I visited reddit's r/IAmA community Wednesday to answer your questions. Here are some highlights.

Can you briefly summarise your position on climate change?

Yes, though it's not an issue I am focusing on much at the moment. My view is summarised in a lecture I gave in 2016 called Global Warming versus Global Greening. I've covered climate change for over 30 years since I was science and technology editor of the Economist. In that time my view has changed. I have always accepted that man-made climate change through CO2 emissions is real. I used to worry that it would prove very dangerous. Having seen it occur slower than was predicted in the first IPCC report in 1990, and have less effect on the frequency of droughts, floods and storms than was then predicted, and having seen estimates of climate sensitivity come down, I now think it is likely that it will be at the bottom of the range of possibilities considered by the IPCC, do relatively little harm at least for several decades, that there are other environmental problems we should be more concerned about, that the measures we are taking to combat it will in some cases do more environmental harm than good, and that the way to tackle it is to encourage innovation in energy systems while ensuring maximum prosperity to pay for adaptation and research.

While, as I said, it's not an issue I am focusing on much, I was happy to remind everyone of my position.

I am interested in many fields and disciplines both within and outside science, so I consider myself a generalist as opposed to a specialist. A piece of advice I like is that to make the world better stick to what you're good at and change what you can. As a generalist, if I want to make the world better, but don't want to stick to one specialty, how can I do that?

It is a good question, because I think human beings have achieved great things through specialisation accompanied by exchange: becoming narrower in what they produce and wider in what they consume. That's the main theme of human history in one reading. In that sense, doing what I do, which is to comment on and engage with several different areas of human endeavour is probably a mistake. One might achieve more by sticking to one thing. But you are only on the planet once; seems a shame to be too narrow! Actually I think I am fairly narrow, in that mostly I write and I speak - that is my specialisation.

Could you give your view on the precautionary principle in the context of innovation? At what level of safety assessment you would say we can declare an innovation with potentially huge consequences (e.g. GM crops, research in AI, etc.) safe enough?

This is a topic I am very interested in. One version of the precautionary principle is essential: better safe than sorry. However, as interpreted by the EU especially, another version has become essentially a device for preventing innovation often on behalf of incumbent interests. Here are the main problems with it: it holds the new to a higher standard than the old, demanding hazard-free innovations when they are replacing existing technologies that have huge hazards. For example, vaping is required to pass tests for toxicity that cigarette smoke is not; and, it ignores the benefits of an innovation, requiring authorities to consider only the hazards. Thus the fact that biotechnology has resulted in a lower reliance on chemicals in agriculture is not taken into account... If the precautionary principle had been in use during the invention of the motor car, that technology would never have been allowed because it brought several new hazards.
It needs to be balanced by an innovation principle in my view: that regulation must not deter or prevent potentially beneficial innovation. I strongly recommend the chapter about this in Ed Regis's new book on Golden Rice.

What made you choose innovation as the topic of your next book?

I have become increasingly fascinated by the topic of innovation. It's such a mysterious process, crucial to the modern world, but we have very little idea of why it happens when and where it does and to what technologies or institutions. I am always interested in mysteries and I decided to tackle this one head-on, having touched on it in my two previous books.

Considering the rise of Crispr, what is your opinion on designer babies?

We have been worried about those ever since the 1960s. First artificial insemination was going to cause people to choose designer babies; then in vitro fertilisation, then genetic testing; then cloning, then gene sequencing, now genome editing. It's largely a non problem for two reasons: 1. There is very little demand; unexpectedly people choose these technologies to have their own children rather than super-babies, and they like kinds that are like themselves. 2. The genetic determination of features like intelligence or musical ability is, we now know, achieved by thousands of genes working together, and it's highly impractical to pick one or two out. So crispr is going to be used to delete serious genetic disorders, not to enhance abilities, I think.

Thank you for all your questions! I answered about a dozen overall. For those who didn't get to ask one, I hope to visit again.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook. My new book How Innovation Works is coming May 2020, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

The First Review of How Innovation Works and Other News

From the Kirkus review of How Innovation Works:

Throughout the book, the author delivers fascinating histories of technology that we take for granted. Many hands contributed to the developments of the steam engine, automobile, and computer. Ridley makes a convincing case that obsessive trial and error works better than inspiration and illustrates with insightful accounts of Edison, the Wright brothers, and Marconi. Some breakthroughs are inexplicable. People hauled luggage for a century, but the wheeled suitcase only appeared in the 1970s.

Kirkus is an "advance reviewer" that primarily servers publishers and other reviewers, but feel free to reach out if you're in media and would like to request your own review copy, publish an article, do an interview, etc.

How Innovation Works will be released in the UK on May 14th and in the US on May 19th, but is available to pre-order now.

 

YouTube, LinkedIn, reddit AMA

On February 19th at 6pm (1pm ET in North America) I will officially be doing a "reddit AMA". We get a lot of questions on social media, and for the first time, the public will have the opportunity to "ask me anything"!

I also officially launched my own YouTube channel, and have been active on Facebook and LinkedIn. There is still time to be one of my first 1000 YouTube subscribers.

Thank you for your support as I have become more active on social media. I look forward to answering your questions next week!

 

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook. My new book How Innovation Works is coming May 2020, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

Genome Editing

I believe it is absolutely vital that the UK government signals its encouragement of genome editing in agriculture.

My speech in the House of Lords today:

View the full meeting and transcript

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook. My new book How Innovation Works is coming May 2020, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

Britain needs to rediscover failure if it wants to prosper

My article from The Spectator:

What was Brexit for? After finally taking Britain out of the European Union, the Prime Minister can now start to give us his answer — and the opportunity in front of him is pretty clear. He could speed up, perhaps double, the rate of economic growth by unleashing innovation. After leaving the slow steaming European convoy, Britain must not chug along but go full speed ahead. That means rediscovering trial and error, serendipity and swiftness — the mechanisms by which the market finds out what the consumer wants next.

The stifling of innovation by vested interests in the corridors of Brussels has held Britain back for too long — but it is not the only reason for our sluggish innovation capacity. We can also blame creaky infrastructure, neglect of the north, a glacial-speed planning system, the temptations of a speculative property market, low research and development spending, and a chronic inability to turn good ideas into big businesses.

But compared with the continent, at least, we have an enviable ecosystem of innovation in some sectors. London is one of the best places to start a company in fintech, artificial intelligence or genomics. In the past five years, helped by enterprise investment schemes, Britain has spawned twice as many billion-dollar tech companies as the next best European country (Germany), and last year attracted a third of all European tech investments.

But that’s mostly digital. As the tech investor Peter Thiel is fond of saying, most innovation is now about bytes, not atoms, because we’ve made it so hard to develop new drugs and new machines. Far from living in age of rampant change, innovation has slowed in the West. It is half a century since jet aeroplanes got faster. Drug development has ground almost to a halt. The turnover of firms in the stock market is falling.

The problem lies in translating ideas into practical products people actually want to buy. Britain’s been bad at this for decades, and most policy-makers underestimate the difficulty — and the value — of turning an idea into a product. Thomas Edison, who worked through 6,000 different plant materials before settling on Japanese bamboo as the best material for light-bulb filaments, famously said that innovation is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.

The answer does not lie in spin-outs from universities. As long ago as 1958 the economist John Jewkes in an influential book warned governments against investing in pure science as the main way of stimulating economic growth. Science is just as often the fruit of technology as it is the seed (though fruits contain seeds). Boosting science spending is a good thing, but it won’t turn Britain into Silicon Valley on its own.

Richard Jones of Sheffield University recently caught the attention of Dominic Cummings with an essay about the need for better innovation policies, especially ones that work up north. Many of his suggestions are valuable, but his focus is on how to use the government to boost innovation, and that way lies danger. Except when setting standards, government has a habit of picking technologies it thinks we should want, rather than the ones we actually do want. As Oxford’s Professor Dieter Helm has put it with respect to energy policy, governments love picking winners, but losers are good at picking governments.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver met a chap in the Grand Academy of Lagado who had ‘been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers… He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me “to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity”.’

History shows that the way innovators make ideas into practical and affordable products or processes is trial and error. Edison understood that, as does Jeff Bezos, who made plenty of mistakes on his way to huge success. Says Bezos: ‘Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week.’ Among Silicon Valley’s best features is a forgiveness of going bust at least once. Capital there is patient and takes risks.

Paradoxically, one thing Britain needs is more failure, or rather the courage to take risks. In a high-cost economy it’s rational to be timid; in a low-cost economy, you can afford to fail in order to learn. We are currently a high-cost economy, which makes people risk-averse. Government has to make risk-taking less economically dangerous, and that means a liberal fiscal policy and speeding up the decisions of regulators: Brussels took more than two years to decide even whether to regulate genome editing in plants, while America and China forged ahead. Cutting costs and delays will be popular with households as well as innovators, so it really shouldn’t be too difficult.

Vast vested interests are ranged against innovation, especially in Brussels, where big business and big pressure groups swarm all over the Commission and parliament. For example, the green movement raised a lot of money by opposing agricultural biotechnology and fracking; big pharma tried hard to kill vaping to protect its nicotine patches and gums through an EU directive. The extreme version of the precautionary principle in the Lisbon Treaty is killing innovation: instead of ‘better safe than sorry’, it scores any future hazard, however small, but ignores any future benefit, however large. The principle demands that if a product is not known to be safe then it must be deemed dangerous, even if it is far safer than the existing technology it replaces. Thus the EU threatens to ban glyphosate herbicide on precautionary grounds even though the EU’s own food safety authority says it is less likely to be carcinogenic than coffee. And coffee is actually drunk, which herbicide is not — but the EU has formally switched to measuring ‘hazard’ not ‘risk’, which is hazard taking into account actual exposure. Reform need not be a race to the bottom, because existing technologies entrench existing hazards.

We should not abandon the precautionary principle altogether, because it is right to consider unknown risks, but we should abandon the EU’s extreme version and balance it with an innovation principle that requires government to take into account the impact of rules on stifling beneficial innovation. Innovation has always faced opposition: coffee was fiercely opposed by the alcohol industry and umbrellas by the hansom cab industry, but in the old days governments were more inclined to side with the consumer and against the Luddites.

If the British innovation engine starts purring again, we could rediscover the joys of rapid economic growth, with more money for schools, hospitals and improving the environment. Having a global financial centre, a great scientific reputation, the common law, the English language and an open trading system, Britain is as well placed as anywhere on earth to attract innovators. Give it a go, Boris.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook. My new book How Innovation Works is coming May 2020, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.