Various interventions by scientists have extolled the importance of ethics as a pillar that must accompany social progress, innovation and knowledge. And what was done at the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards ceremony.
Among this year’s winners are the researchers who have managed to design proteins with artificial intelligence, a technology that opens the door to new therapies against multiple diseases, and the discoverers of a ‘greenhouse effect’ from 56 million years ago that allows predict current climate change
In the world of basic sciences, researchers are primarily motivated by curiosity. The utility usually goes into the background. But then, unexpectedly, it is found that that discovery has a tremendous transforming effect. This may be the case with the research of Anne L’Huillier, Paul Corkum and Ferenc Krausz, winners of the Frontiers of Knowledge awards for generating the shortest light pulses ever achieved.
Using these pulses, like “the ultra-fast flash of a camera”, it has been possible to directly observe the movement of electrons in atoms, something that happens so fast that until now it was inaccessible to experimental study. Light pulses last only a few attoseconds, that is, trillionths of a second, but they have given rise to a whole branch of physics.
In her speech, Anne L’Huillier, the winner has ventured some of the applications. “Can attosecond pulses help build tomorrow’s computers, which will be produced with very small components? I think this will happen, it’s already underway.”
This research experience is already known to Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli, an award winner in the Information and Communication Technologies category, who revolutionized semiconductor chip design by automating its key aspects. Thus, it made it possible to build much more powerful chips than those that existed until then: only thanks to automation could they go from containing hundreds of components to tens of billions.
Today “chips are ubiquitous.” The most everyday objects work with chips, from cars to planes; from medical devices to smartphones”, he added.
In the current context of debates about the potential risks of technologies such as artificial intelligence, Sangiovani Vincentelli has emphasized that engineering must not cross moral limits: “When it comes to conceiving ideas and bringing them to life, we must take ethics into account and make sure that our creations do not harm human beings or the environment”
“I am convinced that, to be solid, scientific and technical training cannot forget the humanities; many mistakes made in the development of technological systems could have been avoided if we had stopped to think about the scope of their consequences,” he said.
The same award has been received by David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (in the Biology and Biomedicine category), who have demonstrated the immense potential of artificial intelligence in the challenge of finding new effective treatments for multiple diseases. The three have pioneered the use of this technology to study how proteins fold, a central question in biology for more than six decades.
The shape a protein takes in space is key to deciding what function it performs, but deciphering this structure in the laboratory or predicting it from its chemical composition is arduous and error-prone. Both Hassabis and Jumper, from the DeepMind company, and Baker, in his laboratory at the University of Washington, opted for artificial intelligence to try to predict the structure of proteins quickly and reliably. Their work culminated in the development of two tools, called AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold, which determine the shape of proteins in a matter of minutes and with unprecedented reliability.
Both Steven Pinker and Peter Singer, the two thinkers awarded in the Humanities category, have claimed in their speeches the power of rationality to guide our ethical orientation and promote progress. Singer has made a powerful case in defense of “our reasoning faculty” as “the only reliable way to acquire knowledge and move towards a better world.” The philosopher recalled how his book Animal Liberation was received “with hostility and even mockery” when it was published half a century ago, in 1975.
This pioneering work laid the foundations for the expansion of ethical consideration of animals with an argument that Singer has summarized as follows in his speech: “Pain is pain, regardless of the species that experiences it, and it is not justified to ignore it or to downplay it for not being the one who suffers a member of our species.
The awards have also focused their attention on the two great challenges facing humanity, global warming and biodiversity. Ellen Thomas, awarded in the Climate Change category together with James Zachos, has warned about the “environmental, direct and indirect” consequences that burning fossil fuels entails “problems for humanity”.
Thomas and Zachos found that a pronounced global warming episode occurred 56 million years ago, due to greenhouse gas emissions, most likely from a volcanic eruption.
Both began researching this warming episode and its consequences decades ago, and Thomas has recalled that, for most of his career, he found his field of study “fascinating but without practical relevance to society.”
However, over time he ended up changing his mind. “I was wrong, and I was wrong a lot: the insights gained from studying these worlds of the past, now lost, go a long way toward understanding our present and future worlds,” she said.
Thanks to his research, we now know that global warming caused by human activity can also cause steep rises in sea levels, change ecosystems, and trigger major extinctions.
For their part, the work of the three winners in the Ecology and Conservation Biology category –Susan Alberts, Jeanne Altmann and Marlene Zuk– provides a guide to identify the most effective actions in order to conserve a wide range of animals that encompasses primates, birds and insects.
Susan Albert has analyzed baboon behaviors for generations in changing environments. Her work has focused on expanding our understanding of how non-human primates—and by extension ourselves—perform in complex changing social and physical landscapes.
“Can the level of public spending depend on the method by which the rulers of a country are chosen?” Torsten Persson, awarded in the category of Economics, Finance and Business Management together with Timothy Besley and Guido Tabellini, began his speech with this question for turning political economy into the modern and empirical science that can answer questions like this.
Based on real world problems, and supported by the “revolution” of economic science (game theory and new experimental techniques…), the winners found, for example, that legislative powers that are elected by proportional representation spend more than simple majority election systems: “With proportional elections, total public spending increases by approximately 5%. In the same way, presidential governments spend less than parliamentary ones: according to the data, around 5% less”.
The maestro Thomas Adès, awarded in the category of Music and Opera, recounted how as a young man he discovered that the force of music was “great as nature, the greatest of all powers”, upon finding it “suddenly” in great composers of the past, like “Beethoven, Sibelius, Janá?ek, Stravinski or Messiaen”.
The British maestro has made several references to his earliest influences: it was his father who taught him to play the piano, and who, according to Adès, “now tells me that as soon as I learned some melodies, I just threw him off the stool of the piano”.
He has also mentioned his mother, a historian specialized in surrealism who made the teacher grow up with Buñuel. “For me – she explained – the paradoxes of her work are part of life. It has propelled me, in my desire to ward off that heart attack that never ceases to threaten me, to find my own musical America—a New World—guided by my nature, but also by something that goes beyond myself.”
