Lab Leaks, Toxic Gummies and Rewritten Memoirs

Thomas Söderqvist spent his career writing other people's lives. His biography of the Nobel immunologist Niels Kaj Jerne was built from hundreds of supermarket bags of papers and hundreds of hours of conversation. When he retired at nearly 70, he made himself the subject. He moved 50 years of papers into a basement archive and spent three years reading them page by page. He lay in a darkened room with earplugs to call up memories, and he interviewed several hundred people from his past, including former girlfriends.

The unusual part is where he published it. He posts on Facebook as a feuilleton, a serial form, and borrows his structure from TV drama rather than Dickens. The memoir is split into 16 "seasons," and each "episode" is a 300–500-word post that has to make sense on its own. Each episode takes about a day to write: first a private draft, then a revision in the Facebook text box "with the reader's gaze in mind." He has posted almost 2,000 times to more than 1,000 followers. About 100 of them comment regularly, and a busy thread can reach 200 comments.

Corrections from the crowd

Söderqvist says no single comment changed everything. The effect came from "hundreds of small corrections." Some examples:

• He had blamed a troubled 1970s relationship on his ex-partner Lone's diabetes. A reader pointed out that people describe her own personality the same way, and she has never had diabetes. Söderqvist realised he had used the illness to excuse himself for leaving.

On Feb. 5, 1976, Army Pvt. David Lewis collapsed and died on a 50-mile hike from Fort Dix. His autopsy samples tested positive for an H1N1 swine influenza virus. Surveillance turned up 13 more hospitalized cases, and antibody tests showed more than 200 other recruits had been infected. Fearing a repeat of the 1918 H1N1 pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people, President Ford announced a plan to vaccinate every American. The program started on Oct. 1.

The Fort Dix outbreak had already died out by then, with no new cases after February. But labs around the world had started their own H1N1 vaccine programs. Donald Burke, an infectious disease epidemiologist, argues that this rush had a costly side effect.

A virus back from extinction

In November 1977, Moscow reported a human H1N1 strain, and within weeks it had spread worldwide. It behaved strangely. Its death rate was about a third of a typical flu's. It mostly infected people under 26. And it didn't push out the seasonal H3N2 strain, as new pandemic strains usually do. The two circulated side by side.

Microbiologist Peter Palese explained why using RNA oligonucleotide mapping. His team cut the viral genome into hundreds of pieces with enzymes, then spread the pieces across two dimensions by size and electrical charge. The result was a fingerprint-like pattern of spots. The 1977 virus's pattern was essentially identical to that of human H1N1 strains that had gone extinct in the early 1950s. That explained the age pattern: older people had caught the virus decades earlier and were immune.

The name is also misleading. Chinese reports placed the first detections in Tientsin in May–June 1977. A 2010 study, which dated the samples' most recent common ancestor, put the first human infections in April or May 1976. That is within months of Lewis's death.

For roughly a decade, the leading explanation for how life began has placed it at alkaline hydrothermal vents on the deep ocean floor, sites like the Lost City Hydrothermal Field in the Atlantic. The reasoning held together. Heat helps organic molecules assemble into biomolecules, and these settings were thought to be rich in sulfide, the reduced form of sulfur used to build cell membranes.

A new paper in PNAS by Benjamin Tutolo of the University of Calgary takes that reasoning apart. Tutolo argues the vents fail on chemistry. The fluid turns alkaline only after it cools, so the high-temperature synthesis reactions would not happen under the alkaline conditions the theory depends on. He also argues that reduced sulfur would have been scarce at ancient vents. Together, these mean the building blocks would likely have broken down before the reactions needed for life could finish. The paper doesn't rule out vents entirely, but Schulze-Makuch and Reichhardt write that it is pushing researchers back toward ideas they had mostly set aside.

The alternatives

• Darwin's "little warm pond," in its modern form: surface hot springs like Yellowstone's, championed by David Deamer. Fresh water, UV-driven synthesis of molecules such as amino acids, and evaporation that concentrates the organic soup.
• Tidal flats. Four billion years ago the Moon was closer and tides were stronger. Under the "living pulse" hypothesis, repeated wet–dry cycles in mud help synchronize key biomolecules.
• Ice. Water in the microscopic gaps between ice crystals could act as tiny incubators.

Until the late 1980s, many physicians believed newborns couldn't feel pain, and surgery without anesthesia was routine. A 1987 New England Journal of Medicine study ended that belief: infants operated on that way had massive, potentially lethal stress responses. Researchers have since kept finding adult-like abilities earlier in infancy. Some neuroscientists now take seriously the idea that babies are conscious.

The latest proposal concerns self-conscious emotions: embarrassment, shyness, guilt, shame and pride. These are emotions you feel when you see yourself as an object of other people's attention. Developmental psychologists Milica Nikolic and Robert Hepach reviewed the evidence in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions B. They report that these emotions show up in the body language of children from birth to age two. Most textbooks have them emerging only after the first few years.

How you spot shame in a baby

Basic emotions are thought to show mainly on the face. Self-conscious emotions appear as combinations of face and body. In adults, shame tends to mean looking down with collapsed shoulders. Embarrassment often looks like a smile followed by looking away. The link isn't one-to-one, but the patterns recur. Nikolic says the research shows babies a few months old making near-adult embarrassment displays when they are the center of attention, for example while being showered with compliments.

The hard limit is that babies can't talk. "Whether they really feel them, we cannot say," Nikolic says. The case rests on behavior. It is supported by other studies that use implicit measures, such as task timing and where infants look, rather than verbal reports. Those studies suggest very young children already grasp being observed and taking another's perspective.