Researchers say they’ve accomplished a feat that was said to be impossible 46 years ago: mapping the cells in a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and tracing their activity.

The achievement, documented today in a set of research papers published by the Nature family of journals, is being compared to the Apollo moon shots that were launched more than 50 years ago, and to the drafts of the human genome that were released more than 20 years ago.

Scientists from Seattle’s Allen Institute played a key role in the $100 million effort known as the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks program, or MICrONS. More than 150 researchers worked together through MICrONS to create a detailed 3D map of a cubic millimeter taken from a mouse’s brain — and figure out how the 200,000 brain cells in a speck the size of a coarse grain of sand work together.

“It really has been one of the holy grails of the field from the beginning,” Clay Reid, a senior investigator at the Allen Institute, told GeekWire. “There are many thousands of neuroscientists who study the cerebral cortex, and pretty much everyone who studies the cerebral cortex would like to be able to know what are the sources of inputs to any given cell within the cortex, and what are the outputs of that cell. That’s what such a complete data set allows one to study.”

The origin story for this particular holy grail goes back to 1979, when Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helix structure, mused about the promise of neuroscience — and about the field’s limitations. “It is no use asking for the impossible, such as, say, the exact wiring diagram for a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and the way all its neurons are firing,” Crick wrote in Scientific American.

That challenge struck a chord with Reid, who was a college student at the time. He set out to prove Crick wrong, and succeeded. “That’s exactly the experiment that we just finished up,” Reid said.

The project’s first steps were taken at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, where scientists used specialized microscopes to record the brain activity from a cubic millimeter’s worth of a mouse’s visual cortex as the animal watched movies and YouTube clips. That bit of tissue was then sent to the Allen Institute, where it was sliced into more than 25,000 thin layers. About 95 million high-resolution images of the tissue slices were recorded using an array of electron microscopes. Finally, researchers at Princeton University used artificial intelligence tools to turn the images into a 3D reconstruction of the tissue sample on a cell-by-cell basis.

The wiring diagram and its supporting files amount to 1.6 petabytes’ worth of data. The map traces more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of tangled-up axons, the fibers that serve as the “wiring” for brain cells. It pinpoints 523 million synapses, which are the connection points between cells. Just as importantly, the map provides a guide to the activity patterns recorded by the Baylor team.

Over the years, MICrON’s researchers have provided progress reports on the project, but the studies published today in Nature and its sister journals serve to sum up their work. The papers present findings about the structure of the visual cortex, the assortment of cells found in the sample and how those cells function.

One of the more significant findings has to do with how inhibitory cells control the activity of other cells in a neural circuit. “They’re certainly not on-off switches for the entire circuit,” Reid said. “Different types of inhibitory neurons inhibit different elements within the circuit. They’re switches, but they’re very carefully wired. They don’t turn on and off every light in the building.”

In the years ahead, neuroscientists could use the freely available MICrONS data set to fine-tune their models of brain structure and function. It might also be possible to track down the causes of, and potential treatments for, neurological conditions ranging from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease to schizophrenia and autism.

“If you have a broken radio and you have the circuit diagram, you’ll be in a better position to fix it,” MICrONS team member Nuno da Costa, an associate investigator at the Allen Institute, said in a news release. “We are describing a kind of Google map or blueprint of this grain of sand. In the future, we can use this to compare the brain wiring in a healthy mouse to the brain wiring in a model of disease.”

The data set could also point the way to innovations in artificial intelligence — perhaps including a new generation of neuromorphic computers that would process data the way biological brains do.

Reid pointed out that MICrONS was funded by the federal government through the BRAIN Initiative and the Intelligence Advance Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, partly to seek out new strategies for AI. “The goal of this was, why don’t we use the most complete and detailed characterization of a cortical circuit perhaps as inspiration for new architectures for machine learning?” he said.

David Markowitz, the former IARPA program manager who coordinated the MICrONS program, characterized the funding as a “moonshot investment.” He said the research papers published today mark “a watershed moment for neuroscience, comparable to the Human Genome Project in their transformative potential.”

As was the case for the Human Genome Project, it will take years for the MICrONS data set to settle into its final form. “Yes, we have the morphology for all of the neurons,” Reid said. “Yes, machine learning has located and identified all of the synapses. But the final step of having humans verify every connection in that wiring diagram has not been done. … In order to get there, we will need advances in machine learning.”

The National Institutes of Health is already looking ahead to future frontiers in brain mapping with a program called BRAIN CONNECTS. (That’s a tortured acronym that stands for BRAIN Initiative Connectivity Across Scales.) Two of the goals of that program are to generate a detailed wiring diagram for the complete mouse brain, and to map long-distance connections between different areas of the human brain.

So, what about mapping the entire human brain? “Because of the size of the human brain, it is unimaginable, and I would say impossible in any reasonable future, to map the entire human brain at the level that one did for this cubic millimeter for the MICrONS project,” Reid said.

When he was reminded that Francis Crick said the same thing about mapping that cubic millimeter back in 1979, Reid expanded upon his remarks.

“Crick never set an expiration date for his pronouncement,” he said. “It is possible that we could do this for the human brain, but from this viewpoint, it still is unimaginable. A lot can happen in 46 years. Certainly a lot has happened in the 46 years since Crick said that something was impossible.”

Nature has set up a landing page for research papers related to the MICrONS project. Other papers are being published in Nature Communications and Nature Neuroscience. The MICrONS consortium includes scientists and researchers from the Allen Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, Princeton and many other institutions. The Allen Institute has created a multimedia presentation that traces the history of the project.

Since 2014, UW Medicine’s Institute for Protein Design has spun off 10 startups, and the institute’s director, University of Washington biochemist David Baker, has co-founded 21 tech companies. After Baker won the Nobel Prize in October, interest spiked from graduate students and postdoctoral researchers eager to join IPD in pursuit of academic or entrepreneurial ventures.

The timing was perfect. The artificial intelligence used to create previously nonexistent proteins with the potential to provide new cancer treatments, tackle plastic waste, deliver life-saving vaccines, capture carbon and other essential tasks has hit its stride.

Then everything came to a screeching halt.

Due to Trump administration efforts to slash research budgets and threats to state funding, UW Medicine in February instituted a temporary hiring freeze for non-clinical roles, followed by a university-wide freeze on non-essential positions in March.

That means UW academic departments will likely accept fewer graduate students, and labs — Baker’s included — are unable to hire postdocs unless they successfully lobby leadership for exemptions. That means fewer highly educated researchers will get the chance to delve into these new technologies, potentially curbing the startups spinning out of IPD.

“In some sense it’s like [Charles] Dickens wrote — ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,'” Baker said in an interview with GeekWire.

“The opportunities are incredible. The amount of talent that would like to come here to work on these problems is enormous,” he said, thanks in part to the Nobel Prize. But with the freeze and other funding cuts, they’ve had to push applicants away.

‘A disaster’

If the timing had been different, David Younger could have been one of those people.

Younger is the CEO of A-Alpha Bio, one of the startups that launched out of IPD research. He did his PhD and postdoc at the UW, and co-founded Seattle’s A-Alpha Bio in 2018 after incubating at the UW’s CoMotion. The company is designing proteins and measuring their interactions with other proteins, looking for new connections such as those between antibodies and viruses.

The company has raised $65.5 million, including venture capital investments, Department of Defense funding and grants. It employs about 50 people.

Younger is troubled by diminished support for academic training and research, and its broader impacts.

“It’s a disaster for everyone,” he said. “There are so many different types of careers that are enabled only by those types of educational opportunities and experiences.”

The Trump administration has chopped away at university budgets through multiple avenues. In the name of efficiency, it wants dramatic cuts to National Institutes of Health reimbursements for costs including rent, utilities, administrative support and other infrastructure. Research funding at Columbia University and Harvard is facing uncertainty, with huge amounts of federal support withdrawn or under review amid allegations of antisemitic discrimination. The University of Washington is among the institutions the Trump administration may also penalize.

Added to that uncertainty is a revenue shortfall in Washington state that is pushing Gov. Bob Ferguson and state lawmakers to shrink spending.

“The cuts proposed by the Governor and state legislature disproportionately impact the UW — and do so at a time when the federal government’s damaging cutbacks to research and health-care funding are already hitting home, magnifying their impact,” UW President Ana Mari Cauce wrote in an email to alumni on Tuesday.

Potential for lost leadership

Marc Cummings, CEO of Life Science Washington, an organization promoting the state’s biotech sector, fears the economic impacts of the cuts. In this state, the industry “is primarily home grown with most local companies being able to trace their success back to technology or people that came from UW or other local research institutes,” he said by email.

“America has built a life science industry that is the envy of the world,” he added. “The industry employs 2.3 million people in the U.S. and we lead the world in biotech investment and new drug development. Why? Because we have the best research universities that attract the best global talent and conduct the most advanced medical research.” 

Helen Eisenach is a grad student working with Baker and IPD associate professor Neil King. She has funding for about another year-and-a-half to work on her PhD. What she does next is increasingly uncertain given the decreasing federal support for research.

The situation puzzles her.

While Eisenach is focused on engineering new proteins for treating health and environmental issues, science also stokes progress in communications, technology, military advancement, agriculture and manufacturing. Without funding, the U.S. gives up its leadership in these fields, she said.

“You’re up against countries,” Eisenach said, “who have absolutely no qualms about spending every dollar towards being the best in class.”

Making the world a better place

Daniel Adriano Silva co-founded two companies with IPD roots: Neoleukin Therapeutics, which launched in 2019 and later merged with Neurogene, and Monod Bio, a 20-person company started in 2021 that creates proteins for use in research, health diagnostics and clinical settings.

Silva participated in IPD’s Translational Investigator program, which helps academics transition into entrepreneurship.

He is now CEO of Seattle-based Monod, and believes the local biotech ecosystem is special.

“There is a concentration of talent around machine learning and AI and biosciences here that is unique,” Silva said.

Labs across UW Medicine, the UW and elsewhere in the U.S. are waiting to see how the funding questions are settled and how many researchers they’ll be able to support. Baker weighs the pros and cons of the situation he faces.

“It’s a big blow, just because everything was so poised and the opportunities are so great,” Baker said. With the uncertainty, he wonders “can we support the people who are here? Can we bring in new people? Can we really capitalize on all these amazing possibilities for designing proteins to make the world a better place?

The Dickens quote cited by Baker — which is the start of “A Tale of Two Cities” — continues: “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

RELATED: For Nobel Prize winner David Baker, it’s back to the lab as protein pioneer helps launch more startups

A team from the University of Washington led by Nobel laureate David Baker is using artificial intelligence to design effective enzymes from scratch — an accomplishment the researchers call “one of science’s grand challenges.”

Enzymes are the wizards of the natural world, proteins that can transform molecules and rapidly accelerate chemical reactions under mild conditions. They’re found in every living cell and are essential to life. Enzymes are already being harnessed for drug production and industrial processes. The newly developed tools for enzyme creation could unlock wide-ranging applications.

“Now we can make these enzymes tailored to any reaction of interest, theoretically,” said Anna Lauko, a recent Ph.D. graduate from Baker’s lab. “It’s sort of flipped the way that we would do enzyme design.”

Lauko is a co-lead author of a research paper being published today in the journal Science. Her co-leads are Sam Pellock, an acting instructor in the lab, and Kiera Sumida, one of Baker’s graduate students.

Last year Baker, a biochemist and director of the Institute for Protein Design at UW Medicine, won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work unraveling the molecular design of proteins and developing technologies for using AI to build and test new ones.

In the past, scientists made Frankenstein enzymes, stitching together components of existing proteins in the hope that the assembled parts could manage a precise task. But enzymes often need to perform nuanced operations, changing shapes multiple times as they manipulate molecules.

Pellock compared the old approach to enzyme design to going to a thrift store for a suit.

“It’s unlikely that you’re going to find a suit that fits well,” he said, and the enzymes were the same way. They included the basic pieces, but didn’t perfectly match the molecules that they needed to interact with. The new approach produces bespoke proteins.

To test their cutting-edge approach, the UW researchers focused on a well-studied enzyme called a serine hydrolase. The enzyme is able to cleave a chemical bond that’s key to the structure of many carbon-containing molecules, including plastics, polyesters and a common fat in humans.

The team used the RFdiffusion model, an AI program for generating proteins that was previously developed by Baker’s lab and is open source. They combined that with a newer tool called PLACER that helped them identify the most promising de novo enzyme candidates. The scientists then tested the performance of the machine-created enzymes.

“They’re still not quite as good as native enzymes,” Pellock said. “But out of the computer, these are among the best that have been made and they were made with very high accuracy.”

The accomplishment is a milestone and proves that the researchers are getting close to making new enzymes for human-driven tasks that could outperform what nature has produced.

Sumida, for example, is working to build an enzyme that could help degrade the planet’s massive glut of plastic waste. Plastic is an incredibly new substance on an evolutionary scale so there hasn’t been much time for enzymes to evolve that can break it down.

There is an enzyme in the serine hydrolase family that can chop up the bonds in the plastic that’s used to make water bottles and other products, but there are many other kinds of plastics out there that need to be disposed of sustainably.

“We thought that it would be a really good application if we’re able to build these enzymes from scratch,” she said, and customize them for different types of plastic.

The researchers are eager for the advent of high-performing, AI-designed enzymes after decades of largely disappointing efforts.

“Hopefully you’ll start hearing more about enzyme design projects,” Pellock said, “because they’ll actually yield a functional enzyme at the end of them.”

Additional authors for the Science paper are David Baker, Ivan Anishchenko, David Juergens, Woody Ahern, Jihun Jeung, Alex Shida, Andrew Hunt, Indrek Kalvet, Christoffer Norn, Ian Humphreys, Cooper Jamieson, Rohith Krishna, Yakov Kipnis, Alex Kang, Evans Brackenbrough, Asim Bera, Banumathi Sankaran and K. N. Houk.

Author affiliations include the following UW departments and programs: biochemistry; biological physics, structure and design; Institute for Protein Design; molecular engineering; chemistry; the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. A scientist from UCLA’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry also contributed.

The collaboration is part of NASA’s Transform to Open Science Initiative, which aims to make more than 100 petabytes of satellite imagery and other Earth science data more readily available to scientists, educators, policymakers and the general public.

“The vision behind this collaboration was to leverage AI and cloud technologies to bring Earth’s insights to communities that have been underserved, where access to data can lead to tangible improvements,” Minh Nguyen, Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, said today in a blog posting about the project. “By enabling users to interact with the data through simple, plain language queries, we’re helping to democratize access to spaceborne information.”

Tyler Bryson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for U.S. health and public sector industries, said Earth Copilot lets users interact with NASA’s data repository conversationally.

Bryson noted that the sheer scale and complexity of the information gathered for NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program can sometimes make finding the right information a daunting task. Earth Copilot doesn’t require users to navigate highly technical interfaces or master the intricacies of geospatial analysis.

“Instead, they can simply ask questions such as ‘What was the impact of Hurricane Ian in Sanibel Island?’ or ‘How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect air quality in the U.S.?'” Bryson said. “AI will then retrieve relevant datasets, making the process seamless and intuitive.”

The project leverages Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and the customizable capabilities of Azure OpenAI Service.

“Azure’s robust suite of services, including machine learning, data analytics and scalable cloud infrastructure, powers this AI prototype,” said Juan Carlos López, a former NASA engineer who is now an Azure Specialist at Microsoft. “We’ve designed the system to handle complex queries and large datasets efficiently, ensuring that users can quickly find the information they need without getting bogged down by technical complexities. Our goal was to create a seamless, scalable solution that could evolve as NASA’s data, tools and applications grow.”

Earth Copilot is currently being tested by NASA researchers to explore its capabilities. After the platform is evaluated and fine-tuned, the NASA IMPACT team will look into making it part of its Visualization, Exploration and Data Analysis Project — also known as VEDA.

Some say artificial intelligence will be humanity’s greatest helper. Others warn that AI will become humanity’s most dangerous rival. But maybe there’s a third alternative — with AI agents achieving the status of personhood alongside their human brethren.

The potential for that scenario is the focus of a newly published book titled “The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood.” The author, Duke University law professor James Boyle, says the book has been more than a decade in the making — which suggests more than the usual prescience about the tech world’s current fascination with AI.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, he recalls the reaction he received when he shared his early ideas about the book with federal judges more than a dozen years ago..

“They’re like, ‘Rights are reserved for humans, naturally born of women!’ OK, well, not necessarily a great crowd,” says Boyle, founder of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. “Obviously, things have changed since then. The book seems perhaps less unhinged now than it did then.”

AI has come a long way since 2011. The smarts that were developed for advanced chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are now being integrated into a wide array of software products, including Microsoft’s Copilot and Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant.

The best AI agents can sometimes sound all-too-human, as a New York Times columnist discovered when a Microsoft chatbot said it was in love with him and wanted to become a human. This year, Stanford researchers declared that ChatGPT-4 has passed the Turing Test — an exercise that was proposed decades ago to define the line between human intelligence and machine intelligence.

Will there come a time when AI’s cognitive capabilities clearly exceed ours — and if so, what implications will that have for the rights and responsibilities accorded to AI agents? Boyle thinks that intelligent machines will eventually achieve some form of personhood.

When he began working on the book, Boyle assumed that AI entities would become so humanlike that they’d have to be granted personhood on moral grounds. An example of that from science fiction would be Data’s effort to win the right of android self-determination in an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

“I thought that would be where the debate was,” Boyle says. “And then, increasingly, I realized that an equally likely — maybe even more likely — way that we will actually get some form of legal personality for AI is the same way we did with corporations. Which is, ‘This is convenient. We need someone to sue and be sued.’”

Corporate personhood is a somewhat controversial legal concept that grants corporations some of the rights and responsibilities that flesh-and-blood citizens have (for example, the right to make contracts, and the liability to be prosecuted for crimes) while lacking others (such as the right to marry, run for office or vote).

The idea that Alexa could file suit to get itself out of a contractual obligation may sound as much like science fiction as the Starship Enterprise’s warp drive. But Oren Etzioni, the founder of TrueMedia.org and the former CEO of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, says it’s not so far-fetched.

“If a corporation is a person of sorts, then certainly we will reach a point where AI agents are,” Etzioni told me in an email. “Once AI agents achieve consciousness, then we will need to treat their feelings with compassion.”

Will ChatGPT and other large language models, or LLMs, ever achieve consciousness? That’s not in the cards, according to Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at Seattle’s Allen Institute (which is separate from the Allen Institute for AI).

“There are two questions really here,” Koch told me in an email. “1. Will the behavior, including language comprehension and speech, of AI/robots become so similar to people’s (or even better in functional terms) that most people will treat them as conscious? 2. Will it ever feel like anything to be such an AI/robot?”

Koch says the answer to the first question is, yes, most likely. “The only uncertainty is by when?” he wrote. “And, as Oren implies, this will have moral, ethical, legal and societal consequences.”

However, Koch argues that the architectures that form the basis for today’s computers are incapable of supporting anything like human-level consciousness. “That is, it will never feel like anything to be a LLM, even though these may achieve, sooner or later, super-intelligence. This may change with radically different hardware, such as quantum or neuromorphic computers,” he said.

“Intelligence is about doing, while consciousness is about being.”

Boyle is sympathetic to Koch’s point of view on the question of whether AI agents will ever become conscious. “The current architecture is ‘no,’ but in the future, I think ‘yes,’” he says.

In his book, and in the podcast, Boyle turns to science fiction as well as science facts to lay out his case. He says the movie “Blade Runner” and the Philip K. Dick novel on which it was based — “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” — serve as “the source of the Nile” for his views on how AI agents of the future might be treated.

Boyle is particularly intrigued by a questionnaire that’s used by detectives in the movie and in the novel to determine whether the entity they’re facing is a natural-born human or an artificially produced replicant. The Voight-Kampff test is meant to measure how much empathy the entity feels in response to emotional stimuli.

“For me, the question that both of those works present is whether we’re all replicants — or rather, whether we can pass any test that we would actually be willing to set for something else,” Boyle says.

Boyle thinks the humans who create AI products, and the consumers who use them, will face a different kind of test in the years ahead.

“I would bet you that sometime within this century, there will be companies — whether it’s Microsoft, or whether it’s Anthropic, or whether it’s OpenAI — who are deliberately saying our self-actualizing AIs, which we treat as people, are participating in this,” he says. “It’ll be kind of like a Whole Foods vibe — a sort of ‘fair-trade coffee’ kind of thing.”

Boyle is also betting that other companies will market their AI agents as “loyal cybernetic servants, and nothing else … you need treat them no more thoughtfully than you do your vacuum cleaner.”

“I would expect that to be a division in the market, like the division between proprietary and free and open-source software,” he says.

When will that moment in the market come about? Which approach will win out? How long until we know whether or not our AI creations fall within the line that marks the boundary of personhood? It’s hard to predict precisely what the timeline might be — or what intelligent machines might do once they cross the line.

“I’ll be very nice to my Roomba in the meantime,” Boyle says. “I think that’s the only thing we can all do.”

“The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood” is available in print and as an e-book. As former board chair of Creative Commons, James Boyle is a proponent of open access to information, and so his book is freely available online via the Duke Law School website. (For what it’s worth, James and I share the Boyle family name but are not closely related.)

Allen Institute neuroscientist Christof Koch has also published several books on the subject of consciousness. His latest book is “Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It.” For more about Koch’s research, check out this 2019 GeekWire article, which focuses on an earlier book titled “The Feeling of Life Itself.” You may also like my Fiction Science interview with Koch from 2021.

My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com.

Take a look at the original version of this item on Cosmic Log to get James Boyle’s recommendations for further reading, and stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.

Three weeks after University of Washington biochemist David Baker won a Nobel Prize, the latest venture to spin out from his lab — Archon Biosciences — has emerged from stealth mode with $20 million in financing for a technology that uses computationally designed protein structures to treat cancer and other diseases.

The seed funding round was led by Madrona Ventures, with participation from DUMAC Inc., Sahsen Ventures, WRF Capital, Pack Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments and Cornucopian Capital.

Archon’s proprietary protein structures, known as Antibody Cages or AbCs, have been years in the making. Archon’s CEO and co-founder, James Lazarovits, said the Nobel Prize that Baker won for his pioneering work in the field of protein design confirms his view that the newly unveiled startup is on the right track.

“It’s reaffirmed our conviction for why we’re in this place to begin with,” Lazarovits told GeekWire during a tour of Archon’s Seattle lab. “It’s doing things that were not possible before. … You could not do anything that we’re doing unless there was the convergence of all these different fields at this moment in time.”

The ABCs of AbCs

Archon’s AbC technology combines two molecular-based biomedical tools, naturally occurring antibodies and custom-designed proteins, to create a single new protein structure. These protein structures, or AbCs, are optimized with the aid of generative AI to travel in the body in controllable ways and engage with target cells in a more specific manner.

“There was almost no mystery in whether we could do it,” said George Ueda, Archon’s chief technology officer and co-founder. “It was just a matter of doing it.”

AbCs can be compared to Lego blocks, or to car frames, in the sense that different types of components can be mixed and matched for different purposes.

“At Volkswagen, if you want to make a mini-car or an SUV, they share a design framework known as MQB that shares parts and equipment for improved flexibility, cost savings and speed across multiple factories,” Lazarovits explained.

“By building a modular design platform, we readily iterate and optimize each design quickly, efficiently and inexpensively, based on data that comes in,” he said. “It’s a validated and efficient engineering framework that we employ at Archon to make better therapeutics faster. We can make two drugs for two different applications, and make it easier to do both.”

The custom-built nature of AbCs helps antibodies bind to the cells they’re supposed to target, while reducing side effects on cells that the AbCs are not intended to affect. “What we like to say is, it’s not whether you’re given a drug, it’s how you’re given it,” Lazarovits said. “How it behaves is actually incredibly important. … It’s not only how it’s distributed and retained, but also how it interacts with its target.”

Archon has already started to put AbCs through animal testing. “We’re printing off new AbCs every eight minutes,” Lazarovits said. “We have data to show we beat out a previous clinical molecule that failed to pass Phase II human trials, and we showed we were able to overcome the issues that limited the molecule’s success. And so, the AbC platform isn’t theoretical — we are making real products.”

This short Archon video shows how Antibody Cages are created:

Building a business

The work being done by Archon’s staff of 17 full-time employees has benefited from academic grants.

“As research faculty at the University of Washington, George and I were very on top of things with respect to grant funding,” Lazarovits said. “We earned / won over $7 million in grants, so we were in a position where we were essentially in the pre-seed stage. … We are asking these important questions that we know every investor would want to know, but we’re not doing it on anybody’s dime.”

A research paper laying out the concept behind Antibody Cages was published in the journal Science in 2021, and Ueda recalled discussing how to commercialize the technology with Baker, another one of Archon’s co-founders.

“David said, ‘Well, George, if we do this, no one’s going to develop it for you. … Have you ever thought about starting a company?'” Ueda recalled. “I said, ‘No, but I can’t not do this.’ There’s another shared belief that Jamie and I have — that if you have a unique opportunity, it’s on you to do it.”

Ueda and Lazarovits followed a path that’s much like the one taken by earlier spinouts from the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design. They licensed the AbC technology from UW and incorporated Archon Biosciences in 2023.

Even before Archon was founded, the researchers were on Madrona Ventures’ radar screen. “AbCs are a revolutionary approach to antibody therapeutics that creates immediately actionable engineering solutions to intractable drug development challenges,” Chris Picardo, who’s a partner at Madrona Ventures and one of Archon’s board members, said today in a news release.

“James and George have assembled a team of world-class scientists and pharmaceutical industry veterans that is able to create new preclinical molecules with extraordinary speed and accuracy,” Picardo said. “We’re excited to partner with them at the forefront of generative protein design and realize the myriad of possibilities to engage currently undruggable targets and pathways to improve human health.”

Taking aim at cancer

Archon is already focusing in on its first therapeutic applications, most likely including cancer treatment.

“We can either make a cancer cell die a lot, die a little bit, be neutral, or target an immune cell that fights the cancer and turn that up, activate that,” Ueda said.

Lazarovits said it’s too early to be more specific about the applications.

“There are very obvious applications in oncology,” he said. “We’re currently not going into explicit detail on the program, but we’re in a fortunate position. … Because we can insert ourselves so well into this established framework, we hope in the not-too-distant future that we’ll have these lead programs defined.”

The newly announced funding round is meant to take Archon to the next level.

“We will get to a point with this money that we will be able to clearly articulate our lead program, and how it offers differentiated value relative to therapeutics that have previously developed or deployed in a clinic,” Lazarovits said. “I would say that probably within the next 18 months, we’ll have strong conviction over lead programs to move into the clinic.”

A team led by researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is finding new ways to accelerate the pace of computational chemistry, by making tools for quantum computing and AI-assisted data analysis available via the cloud.

Their effort to make supercomputer-scale resources more widely available through cloud computing could aid in the search for methods to break down toxic “forever chemicals” that are currently hard to get rid of. And that’s just one example.

The researchers describe their progress on the project — known as Transferring Exascale Computational Chemistry to Cloud Computing Environment and Emerging Hardware Technologies, or TEC⁴ — in a study published today in the Journal of Chemical Physics.

“This is an entirely new paradigm for scientific computing,” PNNL computational chemist Karol Kowalski, who led the cross-disciplinary effort, said in a news release. “We have shown that it’s possible to bundle software as a service with cloud computing resources. The initial proof of concept shows that cloud computing can provide a menu of options to complement and supplement high-performance computing for solving complex scientific problems.”

The TEC⁴ project makes use of resources including Berkeley Lab’s Perlmutter supercomputer, Microsoft’s cloud-based Azure Quantum Elements platform and NWChem, a computational chemistry software package developed at PNNL.

Study co-author Nathan Baker, product leader for Azure Quantum Elements, said Microsoft’s collaboration with PNNL “is a great example of how modern AI and HPC [high-performance computing] tools can advance computational chemistry.”

In their proof-of-concept exercise, the researchers ran a simulation of chemical interactions involving perfluorooctanoic acid — which is one of the industrial “forever chemicals” that was historically used for the production of non-stick coatings and firefighting foam. The chemical, also known as PFOA, was banned worldwide in 2019 but still persists in the environment.

The simulation traced a step-by-step process that broke down some of PFOA’s molecular bonds. “This sequence of reactions highlights a potential pathway for the degradation of PFOA, providing valuable insights into the chemical behavior and breakdown of this persistent environmental pollutant,” the researchers reported.

Now the researchers are recruiting additional collaborators to put their cloud-based platform to more rigorous tests. “We are building a family of codes,” Kowalski said. “The goal is to build a community around this effort.”

A graduate-level course that builds on the TEC⁴ project has already been developed at the University of Texas at El Paso, in collaboration with PNNL and Central Michigan University. Kowalski said TEC⁴ is pointing the way not only to new chemicals, but also to new ways of doing chemistry.

“We envision an ecosystem of use cases from low-tier to high-tier jobs that take advantage of GPU-based computing now being used extensively for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications,” Kowalski said. “We want to allow users to take advantage of different layers of compute, paying only for what’s needed and bundling software with compute access. This is the first step toward that future state.”

Kowalski and Baker are among 32 authors of “Electronic Structure Simulations in the Cloud Computing Environment,” the study published in the Journal of Chemical Physics. Other authors represent PNNL and Microsoft Quantum as well as Berkeley Lab, Argonne National Lab, Central Michigan University, the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Washington.

University of Washington biochemist David Baker has won a share of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for more than two decades of discoveries about the molecular structure of proteins — discoveries that have led to new medical therapies, new materials and new startups.

“I’m very, very excited about the future,” Baker, who is the director of the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design, said today during a Seattle news briefing. “I think protein design has huge potential to make the world a better place, and I really do think we’re just at the very, very beginning.”

Baker shares the prize with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who have also pioneered computational techniques for predicting protein structure. They will be awarded their medals at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Baker “has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins.”

“His research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors,” the academy said in a news release.

Proteins serve as the foundation for biological processes, literally unlocking the workings of the cell. But determining the 3D structure of those molecular “keys” is a devilishly complex task. “Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind,” the Swedish academy said.

Baker and his colleagues developed an early protein design tool and made the code available through a consortium called Rosetta Commons. That code was leveraged into a game-like crowdsourcing campaign called Foldit, which enlisted hundreds of thousands of computer users to help unravel the twists and turns of proteins.

The advent of artificial intelligence tools accelerated the pace of protein structure prediction — and today, the Institute for Protein Design and Google DeepMind are recognized as the world’s leaders. Microsoft’s chief scientific officer, Eric Horvitz, noted on LinkedIn that “we made the decision to go all-in with David” five years ago and work together on accelerating the development of vaccines and drugs with AI.

Half of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry, which comes with a $1 million cash prize, will go to Baker. Hassabis and Jumper will share the other half.

Baker’s research contributed to the development of the world’s first computationally designed protein medicine, a vaccine for COVID-19 that was pioneered by colleagues at UW Medicine. UW says Baker holds more than 100 patents and has co-founded 21 biotech companies — some of which have already been acquired.

Takeda Pharmaceuticals bought one of the Institute for Protein Design’s spinouts, PvP Biologics, for $330 million. AstraZeneca paid $1.1 billion to acquire a different spinout, Icosavax, which develops synthetic vaccines that target naturally occurring viruses. Other spinouts associated with the institute include Cyrus Biotechnology, Sana Biotechnology, A-Alpha Bio and Xaira Therapeutics.

In 2020, Baker won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. “Being able to design proteins from scratch, to do exactly what you want to do rather than modifying what we find around us, is kind of like the transition out of the stone age,” he told GeekWire at the time.

Today, Baker said the technology could be harnessed to synthesize new treatments for maladies including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and autoimmune disease; to produce chemicals that break down plastics and other pollutants; and to create new materials for applications that might be considered close to the lunatic fringe.

“You can imagine all kinds of hybrid materials that could be superior in many ways to any of the materials that we have today, including semiconductor materials,” he said. “So, it could be a new way of patterning things for electronics. I’d say that still qualifies as lunatic fringe.”

During a panel discussion in June about the Seattle tech ecosystem, Ken Horenstein, general partner at Pack Ventures — which invests in startups with ties to the UW — said Baker’s lab was “transformational to the world.”

“It is a matter of when he will win a Nobel Prize, not if he will win a Nobel Prize,” Horenstein said at the time.

In the wake of today’s announcement, David Younger, CEO of A-Alpha-Bio, called Baker a “brilliant and visionary biochemist.” Nikesh Parekh, who was CEO of Bio Architecture Lab, another startup spun out from Baker’s lab, said he’s “a true pillar of the Seattle tech community.”

“David is an inspirational and incredibly supportive academic co-founder to work with, in that he understands that both the opportunities and the challenges of commercialization,” Parekh told GeekWire in an email.

Baker is the eighth UW faculty member to receive a Nobel.

“Let’s be honest: This is about as good as it gets,,” UW President Ana Mari Cauce said at today’s news briefing. “We are so proud to be the home of some of the most remarkable, creative, innovative and talented faculty, and we don’t have a better example of that than David.”

Baker, 62, was born in Seattle and grew up not far from the UW campus. Both his parents were UW faculty members, and he graduated from Seattle’s Garfield High School in 1980. “He really is a local kid, and he ‘s having a global impact,” Cauce said.

Baker completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard in 1984, and earned his doctorate in biochemistry in 1989 at the University of California at Berkeley. He’s been a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry at the UW School of Medicine since 1993. “I’ve been here for quite a long time, and I never thought for a nanosecond about leaving,” Baker said.

His wife, UW Medicine biochemist Hannele Ruohola-Baker, is a noted stem-cell biology researcher. Baker told The Associated Press that Ruohola-Baker was beside him when he got the news about the Nobel early this morning, and that she immediately started screaming.

“It was a little deafening,” Baker told AP.

GeekWire’s Taylor Soper contributed to this report.

The U.S. Coast Guard took a deep dive into the regulations governing submersibles today at a public hearing looking into the causes of last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan sub and its crew. And the issues raised sometimes got as murky as the depths of Puget Sound, where Titan underwent its first tests.

Among the witnesses who testified at the hearing in South Carolina was John Winters, the master marine inspector for Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound. For more than a decade, Winters worked with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush on the regulatory requirements for two of the Everett, Wash.-based company’s subs, known as the Antipodes and Cyclops 1. But today he told the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation that he had nothing to do with Titan.

Winters recalled a time, about two years ago, when he was at OceanGate’s headquarters on the Everett Marina to check on one of the two submersibles in the Coast Guard’s records. He said he saw the three subs on a barge, and someone told him, “We finally got our submarine to go to the Titanic.”

“But that was the only thing in passing,” Winters said. “Nothing about what it was constructed to, who witnessed it. None of that stuff. Just, ‘Here it is, look at the outside.’ … That’s as far as it went.”

In the wake of the Titan tragedy, the Coast Guard is likely to go further. One of the objectives of this month’s hearings is to lay the groundwork for regulatory changes that would help head off future fatal incidents involving submersibles.

Five people died when Titan underwent a catastrophic implosion during its descent to the Titanic in June 2023. In addition to Rush, who was piloting the sub, the victims included veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet, British aviation executive Hamish Harding, Pakistani-born billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

The investigative board has already heard witnesses recount their concerns about OceanGate’s use of carbon-fiber composite for its hull. Two witnesses — from NASA and Boeing — added context to those concerns today. But most of the hearing was devoted to the regulatory gaps that the Titan tragedy brought to light.

Winters said Rush made no effort to get Titan inspected by the Coast Guard. And although OceanGate worked with the Coast Guard to get its other two subs received designations as oceanographic research vessels, or ORVs, Winters said Rush often complained that “regulations were stifling his innovation process.”

Small submersibles that are used exclusively as research vessels are exempt from some Coast Guard regulations — including one that requires inspections for subs that take on paying customers. OceanGate’s business model relied on having “mission specialists” pay a fee to participate in what were portrayed as research missions.

“Is it an ORV? Then, are they scientific personnel? If both of those answers are yes, the payment matter is moot,” said Lt. Cmdr. Jonathan Duffett of the Coast Guard Office of Commercial Vessel Compliance.

It’s typically up to the officer in charge of marine inspection in each Coast Guard sector to determine whether a sub and its crew are involved in a research mission. Winters said communication between sectors can sometimes get spotty. He said he would receive notices about Antipodes’ missions in other jurisdictions, but didn’t get notified about OceanGate’s Cyclops 1 dive into New York’s Hudson Canyon in 2020.

The Cyclops 1 dive to the wreck of the Andrea Doria in 2016 raised even more questions: Investigators said Cyclops didn’t have its ORV designation for that voyage, but took on a mission specialist who paid $35,000 for the trip.

Duffett ran through all the requirements for small submersibles, and then said that “if all those boxes are checked, then, yes, it would fall under the definition of a small passenger vessel and have to have a certificate of inspection.”

And then there’s Titan. The fact that Titan went out to sea from a Canadian port and operated in international waters for its Titanic dives, the Coast Guard didn’t exercise any oversight over those dives. But could the Coast Guard have played more of a role when Rush was testing Titan in Puget Sound? That was the question on the mind of Jason Neubauer, chair of the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation.

“If OceanGate were testing a pressure submersible with just the owner on board, or a crew member, before the vessel was certified or registered, could they legally do that?” he asked Duffett.

Duffett hemmed and hawed a bit. “As far as Coast Guard requirements go, as long as they’re in compliance with Subchapter C, and there are other generally applicable requirements, environmental requirements and 33 CFR rules of the road, that sort of thing … but it’s feasible to do that legally. Yes.”

The Coast Guard is due to wrap up its hearings on Friday with testimony from former OceanGate employee Matthew McCoy; Capt. Jamie Frederick of Coast Guard Sector Boston, who helped lead the search effort for the Titan sub; and Scott Talbot, a search-and-rescue specialist at the Coast Guard.

Other highlights from the hearing

Boeing provided engineering advice to OceanGate at the very start of the design process for the Titan sub, Boeing engineer Mark Negley told the investigative board. He said OceanGate got in touch with Boeing in the 2013 time frame because of the supporting role that Boeing played in the development of an autonomous underwater vehicle known as Deepglider for the University of Washington.

Negley said Boeing engineers looked at the feasibility of using carbon-fiber composite for the submersible’s hull, and noted the challenges that would be involved in building up a cylindrical shell thick enough to meet OceanGate’s specifications. Boeing also helped OceanGate record acoustic readings during tests of subscale hull models. But the relationship fizzled out in the 2016-2020 time frame — and Negley was asked why.

“We had a number of different requests from OceanGate to respond to different requests for proposals,” Negley said. “I don’t know exactly. I think maybe we were too expensive.”

In June, Wired magazine reported that Negley sent an email to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush in 2018, warning him that Titan’s carbon-fiber hull had “a high risk of significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters.” Negley reportedly included a graph showing how the strain would increase at lower depths, with a skull and crossbones marking the region below 4,000 meters. That email didn’t come up during today’s hearing.

NASA had an agreement with OceanGate in 2020 to help the company manufacture the carbon-fiber hull that the Titan sub used for Titanic trips. NASA engineer Justin Jackson confirmed that the contract called on OceanGate to pay $148,874 for engineering advice as well as production, testing and analysis of scale models of the hull. Jackson said NASA was interested in the project because the technology could be used to build space habitats and radiation shields.

The partnership didn’t last long. “The COVID pandemic occurred, and we weren’t able to accomplish any of the fabrication. We provided remote consultation throughout the build of their one-third-scale article, but we did not do any manufacturing or testing of their cylinders,” Jackson said. “We received roughly $40,000 for the remote consulting effort during the one-third-scale build. We returned close to $124,000 of that $148,000.”

Jackson said OceanGate tried to maintain its connections with NASA. “They wanted to do another press release that we ultimately couldn’t come to a resolution on the details of, and then conversations ended shortly thereafter,” he said.

He was asked why NASA nixed the news release. “It was the language they were using,” Jackson said. “It was getting too close to us endorsing. Our folks had some heartburn with the endorsement level of it.”

Previously:

• NTSB spots flaws in Titan sub’s hull and focuses on a bang
• Submarine expert recounts how a Titan trip unnerved him
• Former top engineer says cost concerns shortchanged safety
• OceanGate client recalls a tricky Titanic tangle
• Titanic traveler makes a tearful plea for citizen science
• Videos show the shattered remains of Titan sub
• OceanGate whistleblower traces the roots of his concerns
• Hearing reveals the last words sent by Titan’s crew
• A new chapter in the OceanGate probe, but not the end

A pair of reports by the National Transportation Safety Board found evidence of imperfections in the carbon-fiber hull that was made for OceanGate’s Titan submersible — plus indications that the hull behaved differently after a loud bang was heard at the end of a dive in mid-2022.

At the time, OceanGate team determined that the loud bang was not a serious problem, but less than a year afterward, the sub and its crew were lost in a catastrophic implosion during a trip to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic,

Donald Kramer, an senior materials engineer who presented NTSB’s findings today at a Coast Guard hearing in South Carolina, declined to go beyond the data and speculate on whether the imperfections or the bang figured in Titan’s doom. But one leading theory for the sub’s failure suggests that weaknesses in the hull gave way under the extreme pressure of the deep ocean.

The five crew members lost in last year’s tragedy included Stockton Rush, who was the CEO and co-founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate as well as the sub’s pilot; veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and adventurer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

The NTSB based its newly published reports on a study of debris that was brought up from the seafloor, plus an examination of carbon-fiber samples that were cut off the ends of OceanGate’s hulls.

Two hulls were fabricated: The first one was used for test dives in 2018 and 2019 in the Bahamas, but was scrapped when a crack was discovered in the 5-inch-thick carbon-fiber composite. The second one was used for Titanic dives in 2021, 2022 and 2023. In addition, the NTSB studied samples from subscale test hulls.

Kramer said the surplus pieces from Titan’s second hull had “several anomalies within the composite and the adhesive joints, including waviness, wrinkles, porosity and voids.” Bulges in the hull were ground smooth at 1-inch intervals during the process of laying down the carbon-fiber strands, according to the reports.

Debris from the sub’s hull showed delamination of the composite, primarily at places between the 1-inch layers.

In addition to looking at the carbon-fiber hull samples, the NTSB analyzed data captured by acoustic sensors and strain gauge sensors mounted in the hull. OceanGate used the data from those sensors in a real-time monitoring system that it had hoped would provide advance warning of problems with the hull.

The NTSB focused on data from a notable dive to the Titanic in July 2022. At the end of that dive, the crew heard a loud bang resonating through the hull. One of the mission specialists who paid to participate in the dive, Fred Hagen, said during earlier testimony that “you would have to be brain-dead not to be somewhat concerned” about the noise.

According to other testimony, reports of the bang also stirred concern among other OceanGate team members at the time — including Phil Brooks, who was the director of engineering, and tech contractor Antonella Wilby.

Hagen said OceanGate determined that “the body of the fuselage of the Titan had just jumped in its carriage, so there was no damage.” Brooks said that “seemed like a reasonable explanation” at the time. But based on its study of the sensor data, the NTSB said strain gauges placed on a specific section of the hull showed significant differences in readings taken before and after the bang occurred.

“It means that there is a sudden change in both the longitudinal and the hoop strain at this particular location of the hull. … There’s a change in the strain in the hull that is occurring at this location that is not occurring at other locations,” Kramer said.

There were also unusual spikes in acoustic activity during the first dive that took place after the bang was heard, but the second and third dives afterward “show a trend of the hull becoming quieter,” Kramer said.

Kramer emphasized that the NTSB was continuing its tests and its analysis of the results. He dodged a question relating to causal connections between Titan’s implosion and the issues that were detailed in the agency’s reports. “That is still subject to our own internal analysis at this point,” Kramer said.

Eventually, the NTSB and the Coast Guard will produce separate reports delving into the causes of the Titan tragedy, and providing recommendations for regulatory changes aimed at heading off such tragedies in the future.

Other highlights from the hearing

William Kohnen, CEO and founder of Hydrospace Group, said the viewport that his company provided for OceanGate’s first hull was rated for use at a maximum depth of 2,150 feet (650 meters), but not for the Titanic depth of 12,600 feet (3,840 meters). He said he pleaded with the OceanGate team to get a better window. “We figured they could buy it in any number of places, and in the end, they did. They just didn’t buy it from us,” he said.

The investigative board’s chair, Jason Neubauer, said the viewport for the second hull was purchased in 2020 from a German company called Heinz Fritz.

Kohnen was the author of a controversial draft letter that questioned OceanGate’s practices in 2018. The letter was supposed to have been sent to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush by the Marine Technology Society, but the MTS board told Kohnen it couldn’t be issued on the society’s behalf.

“It was considered outside the bylaws of the nonprofit organization,” Kohnen recalled. “I had to respect that, and I said OK, and I filed the letter. Was a letter received? That I can confirm, it was, because somewhere down in all the electronic letters that were circulated, one of them got passed on to OceanGate, and Stockton got the letter. And Stockton’s first reaction was to call me.”

Kohnen said Rush argued against his suggestion that OceanGate should get the Titan sub certified by outside experts. “It was the usual response that it takes too long, it’s too expensive, and they don’t know about this technology,” he recalled.

“I don’t think many people ever told Stockton ‘no,'” Kohnen said. “I don’t think he understood that concept very much.”

Bart Kemper, principal engineer at Kemper Engineering Services, said the root cause of the Titan sub implosion was still “indeterminate” — but he outlined potential failure modes involving the carbon-fiber hull, the bond between the hull and the sub’s titanium end caps, and the sub’s acrylic viewport.

In answer to a question that referred back to Kramer’s testimony, Kemper said that delamination in a section of the carbon-fiber composite hull could cause a shift in strain readings. He said he would not have gone ahead with further dives if a significant change in strain was detected in the hull. “I would have stopped operations and assessed,” Kemper said.

Kemper also criticized OceanGate’s engineering approach for not doing a life-cycle analysis of the hull. “This is just wrong,” he said. “It’s flat wrong.”

He said authorities should limit the crew of an experimental craft to an operator and assistant, with no passengers or cargo. He recommended that submersibles should be required to have a minimum level of navigation aids, emergency gear and a standardized lifting point for extraction by a remotely operated vehicle. Kemper said the Coast Guard and the submersible community should figure out “a reasonable minimum standard to require, and why and how to do it.”

Previously:

• Submarine expert recounts how a Titan trip unnerved him
• Former top engineer says cost concerns shortchanged safety
• OceanGate client recalls a tricky Titanic tangle
• Titanic traveler makes a tearful plea for citizen science
• Videos show the shattered remains of Titan sub
• OceanGate whistleblower traces the roots of his concerns
• Hearing reveals the last words sent by Titan’s crew
• A new chapter in the OceanGate probe, but not the end

Karl Stanley has done more than 2,000 dives in submersibles that he’s built himself, so he was intrigued when OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush invited him down to the Bahamas for a test dive in the company’s Titan sub in 2019. But by the end of that dive, Stanley’s curiosity turned to concern.

“In retrospect, there were a lot of red flags,” Stanley said today during a Coast Guard hearing into last year’s loss of the Titan sub and its crew as it was descending to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. Rush, who was the sub’s pilot, and four other people lost their lives in last year’s tragedy.

The Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation, meeting in South Carolina, is looking into the causes of last year’s tragedy and is expected to recommend measures to head off such tragedies in the future. Part of its job is to review OceanGate’s missteps during Titan’s development.

Back in 2019, Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate was testing the sub in the Bahamas, in anticipation of taking its first trips to the Titanic later that year. Rush had made a solo trip to more than 3,900 meters (12,800 feet) in depth the previous December, and Stanley was one of three people set to accompany him on a follow-up dive.

Stanley, who operates a submersible tour company in Honduras, had come to know Rush through the tight-knit community of sub operators. He recalled traveling to Everett to help out with the construction of Titan’s landing and recovery platform — and said he was “excited” about OceanGate’s plan to use a lightweight carbon-fiber hull for Titan.

For the test dive, Titan was brought about 10 miles offshore, and made a gradual descent into the depths. Stanley said he had been warned to “be prepared for noises” — but even with that warning, he wasn’t prepared for what he heard on the way down.

“It’s making noises,” he recalled. “The sound of a carbon-fiber band breaking in a 5-inch matrix is a lot of energy being released. We were all clearly a little disnerved, but he had warned us, and I think nobody wanted to be the one to say they wanted to go up first.”

Stanley said the cracking sounds got louder as the sub neared the Titanic depth of roughly 12,500 feet. “At some point, I don’t remember who — we were all like, well, that’s probably close enough. We’ve been down here long enough,” he said.

“There was kind of like a grand finale of cracking sounds as we were getting close to the surface,” Stanley recalled. He speculated that the sounds were caused by a release of energy that was stored in the carbon fibers during exposure to the extreme pressure in the deep ocean.

Stanley was so shaken by the experience that he voiced his concerns about the hull in a weeks-long email exchange with Rush. “The only question in my mind is, will it fail catastrophically or not,” he wrote in one email.

Stanley argued that Titan should undergo at least 50 tests before paying clients were allowed on board. Rush insisted that OceanGate’s testing routine was sufficient to ensure safety — but Stanley also got the message that he shouldn’t talk to others about the cracking sounds he heard.

Although Stanley agreed to keep mum, he told Rush in a follow-up email that he wasn’t comfortable about it. “The fact that you indirectly told me to not speak about the noises I heard on the dive, to me says a lot,” he wrote.

“I kept trying to tell him, ‘You do not have a marketable product,'” Stanley said at today’s hearing.

Stanley said he didn’t know at the time that the Titan sub had been struck by lightning during an earlier series of tests, or that OceanGate’s engineers had identified a crack in the hull a month and a half after his trip. OceanGate canceled that year’s planned Titanic expeditions. However, the company blamed the cancellation on regulatory problems having to do with a support ship — and never mentioned the crack in the hull.

In 2020, OceanGate ordered a new hull to be manufactured by two Seattle-area companies, ElectroImpact and Janicki Industries. In 2021, the company began conducting Titanic expeditions with the replacement hull. Titan’s second hull gave way in June 2023, killing Rush as well as veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet, aviation executive and adventurer Hamish Harding, Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

One leading theory for the carbon-fiber hull’s implosion is that repeated trips to the Atlantic’s depths, plus exposure to the elements between trips, weakened the hull or the seals between the hull and the sub’s titanium end caps.

If Stanley knew everything he knows now, would he have gone on that test dive five years ago?

“There’s a lot of things that, if I had known, I wouldn’t have gone,” he said. “People have told me that I was, you know, stupid, naive. But really what it came down to was, at that point, I had no reason to believe that Stockton was a liar, and I had no evidence of any lies on his part. When he said that he did a proper amount of testing — he’s a trained engineer, he’s not an idiot.”

Stanley’s perspective has changed since then. “A lot of the things I’ve learned in the last 18 months have been very shocking,” he acknowledged.

Other highlights from the hearing

Did Stockton Rush have a death wish? Stanley said his evolving view on “Stockton’s psychology” led him to believe that Rush went ahead with the dives to the Titanic — even though he knew about the problems with the sub — because he wanted to “leave his mark in history,” and because he was feeling pressure from OceanGate’s investors and clients. Stanley noted that Rush came from a famous family, with two signers of the Declaration of Independence among his ancestors.

“He knew that eventually it was going to end like this, and he wasn’t going to be held accountable, but he was going to be the most famous of all his famous relatives,” Stanley said.

OceanGate’s staff shrunk from about 30 employees in 2019 to 14 or 15 employees in 2023, said Amber Bay, who served as the company’s director of administration during that time frame. Bay said the COVID pandemic was a factor behind the cutbacks. “Any kind of operations at sea were then halted, obviously getting into a submersible and onto ships,” she said. “So we had to get rid of many of our operational staff … because they were no longer needed.” After the pandemic, “we were still in recovery mode.”

Bay confirmed that Stockton Rush occasionally had to put more of his own money into OceanGate’s account to meet payroll. “He increased his investment by making a deposit,” Bay recalled. When asked to identify the main revenue sources supporting OceanGate, Bay replied: “Investors.”

She also confirmed that OceanGate asked employees to delay getting paychecks at the beginning of 2023, because “the finances were just getting very tight at that time.” She said she deferred her own pay, as did Rush.

Bay was asked about the dismissal of Antonella Wilby, an employee who raised concerns about a loud bang that was heard at the end of a Titan dive in 2022. Bay said that Rush fired Wilby because she had “behaved erratically and disturbed the crew.” She said she didn’t recall telling Wilby that she lacked an “explorer mindset,” which was something Wilby said in her testimony last Friday.

In the wake of the accident, OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations.

Bay concluded today’s testimony with an tearful statement about the tragedy. “I had the privilege of knowing the explorers whose lives who were lost — Stockton, P.H., Shahzada, Suleman and Hamish — and there’s not a day that passes that I don’t think of them, their families and the loss,” she said. “It’s been a difficult year for them, and for all of us.”

Previously:

• Former top engineer says cost concerns shortchanged safety
• OceanGate client recalls a tricky Titanic tangle
• Titanic traveler makes a tearful plea for citizen science
• Videos show the shattered remains of Titan sub
• OceanGate whistleblower traces the roots of his concerns
• Hearing reveals the last words sent by Titan’s crew
• A new chapter in the OceanGate probe, but not the end

OceanGate’s Titan submersible briefly became tangled up in the wreck of the Titanic during a 2022 dive, a mission specialist who was on the sub told investigators today.

“We had a skid stuck for a minute,” Fred Hagen said during a hearing in South Carolina that focused on the causes of last year’s loss of the sub and its crew. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

The Coast Guard’s Marine Investigation Board is reviewing the history of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate’s Titan sub development effort, with the aim of making recommendations to avoid future undersea tragedies.

Last year’s catastrophic implosion killed five people: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who served as the sub’s pilot; veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and adventurer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Hagen went on two Titan dives — one in July 2021, which was aborted when one of the sub’s thrusters malfunctioned, and the other in July 2022, which successfully reached the Titanic at a depth of 12,600 feet (3,840 meters).

Nargeolet steered the sub as the crew members took in the shipwreck’s iconic sights, including the bow of the 112-year-old wreck and the ruins of the Grand Staircase. But Hagen said he wanted to see more, and he persuaded Nargeolet to head back toward the ship’s stern section. “I’d asked him to go around where the break was, and for a few moments we had gotten stuck,” he said. “He was very quiet, and he was working the controls. … I leaned over, and I said, ‘P.H., it seems that we’re stuck.’ And he says, ‘Yes, Fred, we are.'”

Hagen said that the skid was momentarily snagged in “pipes and things” on the Titanic wreck, but that Nargeolet managed to free up the sub after no more than a minute or two. The surface support team became concerned about what was happening and “told us to come up immediately,” Hagen said.

“Obviously, when you’re down there, it feels like a big deal. I think P.H. certainly wasn’t overly concerned,” he said.

Hagen’s tale got the panel’s attention. Keith Fawcett, technical adviser to the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation, asked him whether OceanGate had alerted the Canadian or U.S. Coast Guard about the Titanic dive in advance, so that they could have been ready to provide assistance if the sub became entangled in wreckage.

“No,” Hagen replied. “But I did have clear conversations with at least P.H., and probably others. The conversation, as related to me, was that there were few assets on Earth capable of getting to depth, and that if something went wrong, we were all going to die.”

An attorney for OceanGate, Jane Shvets, asked whether the entanglement with the wreck was intentional on OceanGate’s part. “No, it certainly wasn’t intentional,” Hagen said. “It was completely my fault, nobody’s fault but mine. I was egging P.H. on, but it was not intentional, and it really was not a big deal.”

For what it’s worth, U.S. law prohibits people subject to U.S. jurisdiction from disturbing the Titanic wreck site without government authorization, and OceanGate’s stated policy was that it would not disturb the site. During a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session in 2020, Stockton Rush said “we are not disturbing the wreck and just documenting it.” He acknowledged, however, that the currents in the deep ocean were “clearly challenging.”

Hagen, who owns a construction company in Pennsylvania, said he and the other Titan crew members accepted the risks that were involved in diving to the Titanic.

“You don’t do it because it’s safe,” he said. “You do it because of the adrenaline rush. … It was not a safe environment in the Titan, and it was never supposed to be safe. If it was safe, then you might as well just get in a trolley car and ride around town.”

Other highlights from the hearing

Hagen confirmed reports that a loud bang was heard when the sub was surfacing at the end of the 2022 dive — throwing a scare into the crew. “You would have to be brain-dead not to be somewhat concerned,” he said. But Hagen said those concerns were assuaged once the crew was brought out and the sub was inspected. “It turned out, after we got on the ship, that the body of the fuselage of the Titan had just jumped in its carriage, so there was no damage,” he said.

Hagen’s 2021 dive was also marked by anomalies. He said the dive had to be aborted because the sub was off-balance and started spiraling off course. When the crew tried to turn on the sub’s thrusters for a course correction, the starboard thruster failed to activate. It also took longer than expected to jettison the weights for the sub’s ascent.

When the sub resurfaced and was hoisted back onto its mothership, “it slammed down on the deck with quite a bit of force,” Hagen said. “Now, the complicating factor was that the decision had been made to only install four of the 18 bolts in the 3,500-pound titanium dome.” That decision was aimed at reducing the amount of time required to open up the dome and bring out the crew at the end of the mission, Hagen said.

The force of the sub hitting the deck caused those four bolts to shear off. “They shot off like bullets, and the titanium dome fell off,” Hagen said. After that, all 18 bolts were installed for every mission.

OceanGate’s engineering team was “a tough group to work with,” said Dave Dyer, an engineer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. APL-UW provided engineering services during development of OceanGate’s Cyclops 1 submersible and in the early stages of the Titan project, starting in 2013. But the relationship cooled in the 2017-2020 time period, due to differences over issues including the potential use of glass housings on the exterior of the hull, and the integration of the carbon-fiber hull and the titanium end caps. “We were butting heads too much over that,” Dyer said.

APL-UW partnered with OceanGate in 2016 to test a one-third-scale model of the hull for Titan, which was originally known as Cyclops 2. Dyer said OceanGate continued to use a pressure chamber at UW for testing, but APL wasn’t involved in those follow-up tests.

At the time that APL-UW backed away from the Titan project, it looked as if the Titan sub’s design was “heading down the right path,” Dyer said. But he acknowledged that he “was really questioning whether they could do it.”

Dyer said APL-UW also helped OceanGate develop an acoustic monitoring system for the carbon-fiber hull. He said the plan, as he understood it, was to use such a system to determine whether the hull should undergo further testing or replacement before a subsequent dive. “We were under the impression that they were not planning to use it for real time,” Dyer said.

Certification should become a requirement for submersibles, said Triton Submarines CEO Patrick Lahey. OceanGate did not make the effort to certify the Titan sub, and argued that the process of certification, or “classing,” was too cumbersome to match the pace of innovation. But Lahey, whose company has built about 30 submersibles for its customers, said the need to require certification was “the most important takeaway from all this.”

“Yes, there’s additional cost, there’s additional time and hassle associated with it, but the end result is you’ve got a piece of machinery that meets an internationally recognized set of standards and that people can use with confidence, knowing that an independent peer review of a third-party classification society has been conducted on it,” he said.

OceanGate tech contractor Antonella Wilby told the board that the company used an “idiotic” navigation system that required coordinates to be transferred manually from one system to another. “The primary navigational map was a hand-drawn map that showed the bow of the Titanic and the debris field and the stern,” she said. “You could get a lot of error just by accidentally moving this map a few pixels off the reference point.”

Wilby said her teammates on the support ship weren’t all that supportive when she suggested streamlining the navigation system with different software, or when she expressed concerns about the loud bang that was heard toward the end of Hagen’s mission. She said she thought about escalating her concerns to OceanGate’s board of directors, but was told by a colleague that she risked running afoul of her nondisclosure agreement. “She cautioned me that the company is extremely litigious, and that matched with certain things I’d heard,” Wilby said.

When Wilby was asked whether she thought OceanGate was operating safely, she said no. “No aspect of the operations seemed safe to me,” she said.

Previously:

• Titanic traveler makes a tearful plea for citizen science
• Videos show the shattered remains of Titan sub
• OceanGate whistleblower traces the roots of his concerns
• Hearing reveals the last words sent by Titan’s crew
• A new chapter in the OceanGate probe, but not the end

Amateur adventurer Renata Rojas took a trip to the Titanic in OceanGate’s Titan submersible in 2022, and she was aboard Titan’s support ship last year when the sub and its crew were lost. Now she’s worried that the regulatory response to the tragedy will close off opportunities she and other citizen explorers have enjoyed.

Rojas fought back tears as she shared her concern today at a Coast Guard hearing that was aimed at determining the cause of Titan’s loss and formulating recommendations to avoid future tragedies.

“What we’ve all gone through is still very raw. Nothing is going to bring our friends back,” she told the investigators on the panel.

“I hope that this investigation creates an understanding that with exploration, there’s risk. And without taking that risk and the exploration, the world would still be flat,” she said. “I hope that innovation continues so we can make the oceans accessible to people like me who got to fulfill a dream, and that you still allow citizen scientists to participate in expeditions.”

Rojas is a Mexican-born, New York-based banker who began diving when she was 11 years old and long dreamed of seeing the Titanic up close. She participated in OceanGate’s dive to the wreck of the Andrea Doria in 2016, and also took submersible trips through New York’s Hudson Canyon and in the waters close to OceanGate’s home base in Everett, Wash. All that led up to her Titanic dive.

The price tag was more than $100,000, but Rojas said she accepted the cost — and the risk. “Problems arise,” she said. “This was never really sold as a Disney ride. This was an expedition where things happen, and you have to adapt to change.”

She recalled one trip — not her own — where Titan’s crew “spent the night in the sub” because rough weather temporarily ruled out a timely return to the surface. “They slept,” she said.

In June 2023, Rojas served as a volunteer on the Polar Prince, the support ship for Titan’s final dive. She said she assisted the crew members as they entered the submersible in preparation for the expedition.

“”They have to take their hat out, their life jacket out. We all place that into each individual bag so they know it’s their belongings,” Rojas explained. “I was the one holding that bag for them as they got in the sub.”

She recalled that Titan’s last crew was “happy to go.”

“I saw five people smiling, looking forward to their journey,” Rojas said. “We had wonderful weather. We had been waiting for a while for the wonderful weather. Just everything was done on time. So, we’re all excited.”

The five people making the dive were Stockton Rush, who was OceanGate’s co-founder and CEO as well as the sub’s chief pilot; veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and adventurer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Rojas recalled that all seemed to go well until contact with the sub broke off about an hour and a half into the dive. The support team tried to restore the communication link — but after hours of silence, the Coast Guard and other authorities were notified. “We went into ‘go’ mode at that point,” Rojas said.

Four days later, a remotely operated vehicle captured views of the wreckage from Titan’s catastrophic implosion — confirming the loss of the crew.

This month’s hearings are expected to result in tighter regulations for submersible trips, on the federal level and perhaps on the international level as well. In her closing statement, Rojas said she hoped the Coast Guard and other maritime authorities would recognize the need for the kind of privately funded deep-sea exploration that served as the basis for OceanGate’s business model.

“Expeditions are needed, and the oceans are significantly underfunded,” she said. “Private citizens are the ones funding the expeditions, and I hope that doesn’t stop.”

Among other highlights from today’s hearing in South Carolina:

• Rojas took issue with OceanGate whistleblower David Lochridge’s description of the Andrea Doria expedition in 2016. Lochridge suggested that Rush was reckless in his piloting of the Cyclops 1 submersible, and that a heated argument broke out over who should take the controls. “He must have gone on a different dive,” Rojas said. “Nobody was panicking, nobody was crying, and there was definitely no swearing and yelling.”
• Steven Ross, a marine biologist who served as OceanGate’s chief scientist for the Titanic expeditions, acknowledged that he was in the sub last year for a rough dive that preceded the final, fatal trip. That outing, which didn’t go to the Titanic, ended in a tumble when a malfunction on the sub’s platform left Titan stuck at a 45-degree slant. “The pilot crashed into the rear bulkhead,” Ross said. “The rest of the passengers tumbled about. I ended up standing on the rear bulkhead. One passenger was hanging upside down, and the other two managed to wedge themselves into the bow end cap.” He said the ordeal lasted about an hour, but no one was injured.
• Ross said that he managed the scientific program for OceanGate, and that a research paper based on data gathered during Titan’s dives was “in development still.” But he acknowledged that OceanGate had “multiple agendas” for its expeditions. What did he consider the primary mission for Titan’s trips in 2021, 2022 and 2023? “To visit and view the Titanic shipwreck,” Ross replied.
• Ross said he once asked Rush how many dives he thought the Titan sub would be able to take on before it needed refurbishment. One of the panel members asked what Rush’s answer was. “Indefinite,” Ross recalled.

The Coast Guard hearings continue on Friday with testimony from OceanGate mission specialist Fred Hagen; Dave Dyer of the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory; and Patrick Lahey of Triton Submarines. The proceedings will be livestreamed beginning at 8:30 a.m. ET (5:30 a.m. PT):

Previously:

• Videos show the shattered remains of Titan sub
• OceanGate whistleblower traces the roots of his concerns
• Hearing reveals the last words sent by Titan’s crew
• A new chapter in the OceanGate probe, but not the end

Video views from the search for OceanGate’s Titan submersible show mangled components from the craft — and tell the tale of last year’s dramatic implosion, which led to the loss of the sub and its five-person crew.

The U.S. Coast Guard released two videos this week in support of technical testimony that’s expected to be given during this month’s hearings into the cause of the incident, taking place in North Charleston, S.C.

The hearings began on Monday and will continue on Thursday with testimony from Renata Rojas, who was a mission specialist on an earlier Titan dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic; and from Steven Ross, a marine biologist who served as OceanGate’s chief scientist. Technical testimony is likely to come later.

Both videos were captured on June 22, 2023, by a camera mounted on a remotely operated vehicle that took part in the search for the sub. The ROV came upon the scene four days after Titan went missing, and provided the conclusive evidence confirming that the sub had come apart amid the deep ocean’s crushing pressure.

One video shows Titan’s aft titanium dome and ring, plus remnants of the hull and carbon-fiber debris. The forward titanium dome and its viewport can also be seen, not far away. The other video shows Titan’s tail cone, emblazoned with the OceanGate logo.

No human remains are identifiable in the videos — but the Coast Guard said that such remains were “carefully” brought to the surface during a weeks-long debris recovery effort. DNA testing helped to confirm the identities of the victims.

The five crew members were pilot Stockton Rush, the CEO and co-founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate; veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; aviation executive and citizen explorer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

The arrangement and condition of the debris seen in the videos are likely to provide significant clues for determining the cause of the implosion.

OceanGate began sending Titan on 12,500-foot-deep dives to the site of the Titanic wreck in 2021. One leading theory proposes that the stresses weathered during all those trips, plus exposure to the elements between trips, weakened the sub’s carbon-fiber hull or the glue seals that bound the hull to the titanium end caps.

One of the witnesses testifying at the hearings earlier this week, submersible consultant Tym Catterson, speculated that the crew died almost instantaneously. “This had to happen extraordinarily fast, which means the people in there, they had no idea this was coming,” he told the investigative board.

Thursday’s hearing begins at 8:30 a.m. ET (5:30 a.m. PT) and will be streamed:

Whistleblower David Lochridge said today that his concerns about OceanGate and its approach to undersea exploration began long before the company built the submersible that imploded last year during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck.

Lochridge referred back to 2016, when OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush crashed a different submersible called Cyclops 1 into the wreck of the Andrea Doria while Lochridge watched.

“He basically drove it full speed into the port side of the bow, and we could hear the cracking of the fairing as he got us jammed in underneath,” Lochridge recalled. “I’m not going to say how foul my language was, but it wasn’t good.”

At the time, the Andrea Doria expedition was hailed as a momentous achievement for OceanGate. But for Lochridge, a veteran submersible pilot who had joined the company months earlier, it was the start of a sour relationship with Rush.

During the second day of Coast Guard hearings into last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its five-person crew, Lochridge traced how he tried to sound the alarm about what he saw as lapses in Titan’s design and construction — and how he ran into resistance at the Everett, Wash.-based company.

In 2018, as the first version of Titan was taking shape, Lochridge wrote up a critical report about the project, and soon afterward, he was fired from his position as OceanGate’s director of marine operations. When Lochridge filed a whistleblower complaint from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that sparked a messy legal dispute.

“My wife and I were served a settlement and release from OceanGate’s attorneys, basically threatening us,” Lochridge told investigators at the Marine Investigation Board’s hearing in North Charleston, S.C. After months of wrangling, they agreed to a settlement that forced Lochridge to abandon his countersuit against OceanGate and withdraw his whistleblower claim.

Lochridge said he wished OSHA had been more supportive of his claim.

“OSHA failed not only my family financially and emotionally, but stood by and did nothing to prevent further acts of retaliation from OceanGate whilst under the Seaman’s Protection Act,” said Lochridge, who read from a prepared statement. “I believe that if OSHA had attempted to investigate the seriousness of the concerns I raised on multiple occasions, this tragedy may have been prevented.”

Lochridge’s concerns were borne out a year after he was fired, when a crack in Titan’s carbon-composite hull was detected during a series of deep-water tests in the Bahamas. OceanGate replaced the hull and went ahead with dives to the Titanic starting in 2021 — but at today’s hearing, Lochridge pointed out that many of the components were carried over from the earlier version of the submersible.

“They reused these domes, they reused the sealant faces, they reused the acrylic, they reused the interior. Everything was reused,” he told the Coast Guard’s Marine Investigation Board. “It’s all cost. Now, I wasn’t there for that, but I know firsthand, everything was reused.”

Lochridge’s tussles with OceanGate, and particularly with Stockton Rush, came into the spotlight after last year’s catastrophic implosion of the Titan sub.

Five crew members died in last year’s incident, including Rush, who was Titan’s pilot for the Titanic expeditions. The other four were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet, British aviation executive and adventurer Hamish Harding, Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.

The tragedy didn’t come as a surprise to Lochridge. “It was inevitable something was going to happen,” he said at today’s hearing. “It was just [a question of] when.’

A bad day at the Andrea Doria

Lochridge’s account of the Andrea Doria expedition in 2016 hinted at issues that investigators say contributed to the last year’s loss. He said Rush insisted on piloting the Cyclops 1 submersible for the dive off the coast of Nantucket — but ran into trouble when he tried to maneuver the sub off its dive platform.

“He didn’t do it very well,” Lochridge said. “He ended up bending the dive skids on the bottom.”

Lochridge’s plan for the dive called for staying 50 meters (164 feet) away from the Andrea Doria, but he said Rush headed for the 60-year-old shipwreck.

“I kept saying, please keep your distance. ‘Don’t tell me what to do’ … That was the conversation,” Lochridge said. “He came straight down hard on the bottom. No trimming, no ballast, nothing. Smashed straight down on the bottom.”

According to Lochridge, Rush steered the sub up and around, ran into the wreck and started to panic. Lochridge said he tried to take hold of the converted video-game controller that was used to steer Cyclops 1, but “every time I went to take the controller from him, he pushed it further and further behind him inside the submersible itself.”

Eventually, one of the mission specialists in the sub spoke up. “She shouted at Stockton to give me the effing controller,” Lochridge said.

Lochridge said Rush threw the controller at him and “clattered it off the right side of my head.”

When the device hit the deck, one of the buttons came off the controller, Lochridge said. “I picked it up, repaired it, and had us out in 10, 15 minutes,” he said. Rush and the others in the sub were relieved to be free of the wreck, Lochridge said, but bad feelings lingered long afterward because he had “embarrassed the CEO on the Andrea Doria wreck.”

“At a point, he stopped talking to me,” Lochridge said.

Further frictions at OceanGate

Lochridge said he also had a rocky relationship with Tony Nissen, who was OceanGate’s director of engineering at the time and took charge of the design and development of the Titan submersible. (NIssen testified during Monday’s hearing.)

During the early phase of the Titan development effort, the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory provided engineering assistance, but in mid-2016, the relationship with UW was discontinued. Lochridge said he was frozen out as well.

“Unfortunately, after the incident on the Andrea Doria, I was phased out of the project completely,” Lochridge said. “I was told everything was going to be getting done in house with Tony Nissen and his team, who I had no confidence in whatsoever.”

Although Lochridge wasn’t directly involved in Titan’s development, Rush did ask him to conduct an inspection of Titan once it was built, in his role as director of marine operations. Lochridge wasn’t reassured by what he saw.

“I looked at everything — and there wasn’t anything, and I mean anything on that build or pre-build, basically, when the components were there, that gave me any confidence in them producing an efficient product,” he said.

The ability of the carbon-composite hull to hold up under deep-ocean pressure was a major concern. Lochridge noted there were gaps in the pieces of material trimmed off the hull’s edges that were big enough to shine a light through. He was also concerned about the strength of the sub’s acrylic viewport, and the resilience of the seals between the hull and the sub’s titanium domes.

Lochridge said he recommended further testing — with the goal of having the submersible certified, or “classed,” by Lloyd’s Register or a similar standards organization. “The submersible was meant to be classed,” he said. “Part of that classification process is to do unmanned pressure testing of not only the viewport … but the hull itself.”

Rush was opposed to classing the Titan sub, even after the first hull was found to be incapable of withstanding Titanic-level pressures. In a 2019 online posting that has since been deleted, OceanGate argued that the classing process was too slow to accommodate the types of innovations that went into Titan.

“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” OceanGate said back then. “For example, Space X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic all rely on experienced inside experts to oversee the daily operations, testing and validation versus bringing in outsiders who need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.”

OceanGate’s executives dismissed Lochridge’s concerns, which set the stage for his dismissal, the legal mess that followed — and, arguably, last year’s tragedy. Which naturally leads to a question that was asked during the hearing: Why was the advice from an experienced inside expert of Lochridge’s caliber so often ignored?

“Cost cutting, bad engineering decisions,” Lochridge said. “I’d say that’s the two main things. The desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as they could, to start making profit. I knew nothing about the financial side of things, but there was a big push to get this done, and a lot of steps along the way were missed.”

Lochridge acknowledged that he himself wasn’t immune to the Titanic’s allure.

“I wanted to go to the Titanic,” he told the investigation board. “It was on my bucket list, but I wanted to do it safely.”

The board’s next session is due to start at 8:30 a.m. ET (5:30 a.m. PT) Thursday, and will be livestreamed:

The U.S. Coast Guard is beginning two weeks of public hearings into last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its crew during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck — but even before the start of the hearings, the official in charge of the hearings made clear that there’s lots more investigation to be done.

“The hearing is the first step in publicly showing the proceedings,” Jason Neubauer, chair of the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, told reporters today. “We may hold additional proceedings. There could be additional witnesses interviewed. So, I would say it’s hard to give a projection on the end date for the investigation.”

Public hearings are due to run from Monday through Sept. 27 in North Charleston, S.C., with the proceedings livestreamed via YouTube. They’ll delve into the causes of Titan’s implosion, which killed the five people on board — including Stockton Rush, the CEO and co-founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate.

The other crew members were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet and three mission specialists who paid OceanGate to participate in the dive: Hamish Harding, a British aviation executive and adventurer, plus Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Soon after Titan’s disappearance on June 18, 2023, OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations, and its website literally went dark. These hearings will mark one of the rare occasions when people who were associated with the company will be speaking publicly about OceanGate’s activities.

The morning agenda for Monday’s hearing, beginning at 8:30 a.m. ET (5:30 a.m. PT) calls for testimony from Tony Nissen, who was OceanGate’s director of engineering from 2016 to 2019.

Later witnesses include OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein and several other former employees; Tym Catterson, a contractor who was on Titan’s mothership when the sub was lost; and whistleblower David Lochridge, who raised concerns about Titan in 2018 while acting as OceanGate’s director of marine operations, sparking a legal tussle that ended up squelching those concerns.

Two former mission specialists who went on earlier Titanic dives, Renata Rojas and Fred Hagen, are due to testify later this week. The Coast Guard’s witness list also mentions representatives from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, Boeing and NASA who are familiar with OceanGate’s history, plus shipping experts and Coast Guard officials. But the list doesn’t mention Gordon Gardiner, who was named to succeed Stockton Rush as OceanGate’s CEO, or any other current representatives of the company.

In advance of the hearings, investigators said the evidence suggests Titan suffered a catastrophic implosion during its final dive, due to a rupture in the carbon-composite hull or in the seals between the hull and its titanium end caps. Experts on submersibles — including Triton Submarines CEO Patrick Lahey, who’s due to testify on Friday — have said they privately warned OceanGate about the sub’s vulnerabilities, to no avail.

Neubauer said it would be up to other government agencies to follow up on the Coast Guard’s work. “The purpose of this administrative hearing is to uncover the facts surrounding the incident,” he said. “We are charged also to detect misconduct or negligence by credentialed mariners, and if there’s any detection of a criminal act, we would make a recommendation to the Department of Justice. But the main focus of the hearing is to find the facts and make recommendations to make sure it does not happen again.”

When the final round of hearings is complete, the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board will “split off and conduct independent analysis and finish the reports,” Neubauer said.

The reports are likely to recommend new regulations aimed at addressing the safety lapses that led to Titan’s loss. “Those safety recommendations can go domestically to the Coast Guard that oversees federal regulations for these types of operations,” Neubauer said. “But more importantly, I think we can also go globally, to the International Maritime Organization that oversees the operations on the high seas and in other countries. So, I think that’s another possible outcome of this hearing.”

The findings could also fuel legal arguments in civil lawsuits targeting OceanGate and other parties. At least one wrongful-death suit has been filed already, on behalf of P.H. Nargeolet’s family.

RMS Titanic, the company holding the salvage rights to the wreck of the Titanic, says its latest robotic survey of the shipwreck site revealed the deterioration of the Titanic’s iconic bow, as well as the location of a long-sought statuette.

The 20-day expedition, conducted in July and August, provided the first look at the 112-year-old wreck since last year’s OceanGate tragedy. That dive ended in the catastrophic loss of Everett, Wash.-based Oceangate’s Titan submersible and its five-person crew, including company CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush.

In a news release, RMS Titanic said the findings from this summer’s expedition “showcase a bittersweet mix of preservation and loss.”

On the positive side of the ledger, RMS Titanic’s underwater robot captured imagery of a 2-foot-high statuette known as the “Diana of Versailles.” The statue of a Greek goddess once held a place of honor in the Titanic’s First Class Lounge, but it was thrown out from the wreck when the ship struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic during its first voyage in 1912. More than 1,500 people perished in what became history’s most famous shipwreck.

The statue was last seen during an underwater survey in 1986, and some experts feared that it had been lost forever. But researchers found fresh clues in video footage captured during a previous RMS Titanic survey and narrowed down the area for a renewed search. The company said the Diana statue was found and photographed with just hours to go on the final day of this year’s expedition.

Imagery from RMS Titanic’s underwater robot also revealed that a 15-foot-long section of the railing on the shipwreck’s bow has gone missing — apparently due to decomposition of the corroded metal. Two years earlier, the lost section was mostly intact, though in a state of advanced decay, as shown in corresponding imagery that was captured by OceanGate’s Titan sub.

The remains of the railing could be seen sitting on the seafloor in a different image captured by RMS Titanic’s camera.

“The discovery of the statue of Diana was an exciting moment,” said Tomasina Ray, RMS Titanic’s director of collections. “But we are saddened by the loss of the iconic bow railing and other evidence of decay which has only strengthened our commitment to preserving Titanic’s legacy.”

The RMS Titanic team captured more than 2 million high-resolution photos and videos of the wreck site, and mapped the wreck and the surrounding debris field using laser scanning, sonar imaging and magnetometer readings. Now the data will be analyzed for scientific purposes — and to identify at-risk artifacts that could be recovered safely during future expeditions.

In other developments:

• The wrongful-death lawsuit filed on behalf of the family of Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet, who died in last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan sub, has been transferred from King County Superior Court to U.S. District Court in Seattle. The case has been assigned to Magistrate Judge Brian Tsuchida. Plaintiffs in the case say they intend to seek more than $50 million in damages.
• The U.S. Coast Guard will convene a public hearing in North Charleston, S.C., on Sept. 16 to consider evidence related to the loss of the Titan sub and its crew. Sessions are due to continue through Sept. 26 or 27. The Marine Board of Investigation’s hearing will examine all aspects of Titan’s loss, including pre-accident historical events, regulatory compliance, crew member duties and qualifications, mechanical and structural systems, emergency response and the submersible industry. Coverage of the hearing will be live-streamed.

Christian Luscher has spent years trying to figure out why people chase a fix that comes at such a high cost.

Luscher, a neuroscientist at the University of Geneva, explained the biology of addiction in a talk at the Allen Institute last week. The event took place just blocks from downtown Seattle, where an increasing amount of overdoses are occuring, driven in part by synthetic drugs such as fentanyl.

Luscher said fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine. “The onset of action is very fast,” he said. “This is something that leads to its high addiction liability.”

In a recent study of fentanyl, Luscher’s team found that different parts of the brain control the desire to use drugs and the compulsive use seen in addiction.

Many drugs, including opiates, cocaine and nicotine, increase dopamine levels in the brain, producing a temporary euphoria. But over time, some people continue to use drugs for fear of the opposite experience. The best way to alleviate withdrawal “is to take the drug again,” Luscher said.

Until now, scientists believed that the same neurological pathway controlled positive and negative behavioral reinforcement. Luscher’s findings suggest otherwise, which could expand therapeutic options.

There are drugs that can reverse an overdose or treat the symptoms of withdrawal, and legal opioids can substitute for illicit ones in a controlled setting. But no magic pills to quell cravings for fentanyl exist.

“Right now, there’s really no good treatment for addiction,” said Hongkui Zeng, director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

The Allen Institute has several new studies exploring how different drugs change brain activity, building on previous high-profile brain mapping studies. By documenting baseline brain states, scientists can identify where and when things change.  

Zeng said the Allen Institute is “very hopeful” that this research could lead to better causal treatment options. In the meantime, therapies like deep brain stimulation that send electrical impulses to specific regions might be able to help people struggling with addiction.

Some startups are trying to help as well. Boulder Care, a Portland, Ore.-based startup that provides telehealth treatment for people with opioid and alcohol use disorder, raised $35 million in new funding in May.

There were 1,088 fentanyl-involved overdose deaths in King County last year, a record high that mirrored national trends.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell in May announced plans to invest $7 million in recovery and treatment programs, part of a larger effort to curb the opioid crisis and revive downtown.

If Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain-implant venture succeeds in its effort to create next-generation brain implants for artificial vision, the devices could bring about a breakthrough for the visually impaired — but probably wouldn’t match Musk’s claim that they could provide “better than normal vision,” University of Washington researchers report.

In a study published today by the open-access science journal Scientific Reports, UW psychologists Ione Fine and Geoffrey Boynton point out that the brain’s vision system relies on complex interactions between neurons that don’t directly translate into a pixel-by-pixel picture.

“Engineers often think of electrodes as producing pixels, but that is simply not how biology works,” Fine said in a news release. “We hope that our simulations based on a simple model of the visual system can give insight into how these implants are going to perform. These simulations are very different from the intuition an engineer might have if they are thinking in terms of a pixels on a computer screen.”

For the past several years, Neuralink has been developing a system that relies on brain implants and high-level computer processing — with an initial goal of making it possible for quadriplegic patients to interact with their environment by controlling computerized tools with their minds.

One patient, Noland Arbaugh, was equipped with the implant in January as part of a clinical trial. In May, Arbaugh told ABC News that he was “very happy” to be part of the trial, even though the device’s performance had degraded somewhat. During an update in July, Musk said Neuralink’s roster of implant recipients could reach “high single digits this year,” depending on regulatory approvals.

Musk said the next application for Neuralink’s implants, known as Blindsight, would provide artificial vision. Test versions of the device already have been implanted in monkeys to produce single-pixel blips — “a flash here and a flash there” — that have elicited responses from the monkeys, he said.

Blindsight’s performance would have to ramp up significantly before the implants were ready for human clinical trials.

“The initial resolution for vision will be relatively low — something like Atari graphics sort of thing,” Musk said. “But over time, it could potentially be better than normal vision.” (Musk made a similar claim in March on his X social-media platform.)

Fine and Boynton focused on the claims for potential performance by simulating the sorts of images that could be created by combining inputs from tens of thousands of electrodes connected to individual neurons in the visual cortex. By comparison, Arbaugh’s implant has roughly 1,000 electrodes.

The researchers noted that each neuron in the visual system takes in information about imagery in a small region of space known as the receptive field, and not just a single point of light. Their simulations suggested that an image generated by a 45,000-electrode array wouldn’t be nearly as detailed as a 45,000-pixel image naturally generated by the eyes and the brain.

It would be a daunting task to re-create the codes that are used by thousands upon thousands of cells in the visual cortex to produce normal human vision, Fine said.

“Even to get to typical human vision, you would not only have to align an electrode to each cell in the visual cortex, but you’d also have to stimulate it with the appropriate code,” she said. “That is incredibly complicated because each individual cell has its own code. You can’t stimulate 44,000 cells in a blind person and say, ‘Draw what you see when I stimulate this cell.’ It would literally take years to map out every single cell.”

In a follow-up email, Fine told GeekWire that each person has a unique neuronal code for interpreting vision.

“It’s pretty easy to predict the spatial location and the size of the visual world that is represented by a neuron based on anatomy,” she said. “But I can’t think of any way to predict the orientation, or whether that neuron represents an on-cell (bright spot on dark background) or off-cell (dark spot on light background).”

Fine said researchers may someday come up with a conceptual breakthrough that provides a “Rosetta Stone” for visual processing in the brain. It’s also possible that users of an artificial-vision system like Blindsight could learn to adapt to an incorrect code in the system. “But my own research, and that of others, shows that there’s currently no evidence that people have massive abilities to adapt to an incorrect code,” Fine said.

The UW researchers said their computer-generated models may come in handy for assessing the potential performance of artificial-vision systems. Neuralink isn’t the only team working on such systems: For example, a team led by researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology began a clinical trial of a 400-electrode brain implant known as the Intracortical Visual Prosthesis two years ago. This April, the Illinois team said the implants provided study participants with an improved ability to navigate and perform visually guided tasks.

Fine said artificial-vision simulations may also provide surgeons as well as patients and their families with more realistic expectations for the technology.

“Many people become blind late in life,” she said. “When you’re 70 years old, learning the new skills required to thrive as a blind individual is very difficult. There are high rates of depression. There can be desperation to regain sight. Blindness doesn’t make people vulnerable, but becoming blind late in life can make some people vulnerable. So, when Elon Musk says things like, ‘This is going to be better than human vision,’ that is a dangerous thing to say.”

The research described in the Scientific Reports study, “A Virtual Patient Simulation Modeling the Neural and Perceptual Effects of Human Visual Cortical Stimulation, From Pulse Trains to Percepts,” was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The Allen Institute’s OpenScope program lets scientists study the weird workings of the brain — for instance, how magic mushrooms work their psychedelic magic on individual neurons, how memories of the past influence perceptions of the present, and how the brain’s visual system interprets motion and texture.

But one of the program’s leaders, neuroscientist Jerome Lecoq, says he’s really excited about an experiment that hasn’t yet been fully defined. It’s a study that could support a theory about the mechanism by which sensory data is fed into our consciousness — to modify our view of the world, and perhaps to modify our behavior as well.

The experiment is being fine-tuned online by an international community of researchers, through an open-source process that the Seattle-based Allen Institute fittingly calls a “brainstorm.”

“You can just go and follow us on Twitter and visit the Google Doc,” Lecoq says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “We’re going to meet in two weeks and a half in Boston at a conference and discuss this experiment. The document is very open. If you have a good idea, please chime in.”

For centuries, scientists have been trying to figure out how the brain works — and for decades, authors and filmmakers have been delving into the mysteries of consciousness, in works including Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” and the movie “Altered States.” A psychoactive drug plays a fictional role in the recently released Apple TV+ sci-fi thriller “Dark Matter” — by helping its users cope with the strangeness of jumping between alternate universes.

But there’s nothing strange about the experiments being done at the Allen Institute’s Brain Observatory. The institute’s late founder, tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Paul Allen, created the Brain Observatory to play the same role in neuroscience that the Hubble Space Telescope plays in astronomy, or that the Large Hadron Collider plays in physics.

The Allen Brain Observatory studies how thousands of neurons across the mouse brain respond to stimuli, mostly having to do with the brain’s visual system. One of its best-known (and arguably craziest) experiments involved having mice watch the first three minutes of Orson Welles’ film-noir classic, “Touch of Evil,” to see how their brain cells processed the moving images.

Every year, the Allen Institute solicits outside proposals for research that could take advantage of the Brain Observatory’s tools. The OpenScope process follows the model used for reserving research time on the LHC and the Hubble Space Telescope (and, for that matter, on the James Webb Space Telescope as well).

“We thought that, moving forward, it will be really impactful if scientists across the community could propose projects — essentially, make a marketplace of ideas, where neuroscientists across the world could put their ideas forward,” Lecoq says. “And then we run the experiment with them, and make the data set available in the same way to the broad community.”

The experiments are supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

This year’s brainstorm project adds a crowdsourcing twist to the usual process. The general focus of the planned experiment has to do with a theory of brain function known as predictive coding.

The theory suggests that the brain is constantly generating and updating a mental model of the environment — and that sensory inputs are processed with the goal of identifying and correcting any errors in that model. “I would say predictive coding is probably what is feeding your consciousness,” Lecoq says.

But how does the error-correcting process work? Right now, that’s a mystery. “The question in that theory is, where is the error calculated in the brain? Which neurons are doing this computation?” Lecoq says.

Researchers are contributing online to a nearly 40-page document that outlines potential experiments to address that question. “There are six experiments already laid out,” Lecoq says. “We’ll see where that leads us. Eventually, we’re going to have a poll throughout the community and see which experiments are the most impactful, and we’ll run it.”

The predictive coding experiment isn’t the only item on this year’s OpenScope agenda. Four other research projects have been selected to take advantage of the Allen Brain Observatory’s data-gathering pipeline:

What makes cells go psychedelic? A project led by researchers at Humboldt University of Berlin will focus on how psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, changes the activity of neurons in living mice. One of the project leaders, Roberto de Filippo, said in a news release that the experiment could provide “fundamental insights into the processes that govern perception, cognition, and consciousness itself.”

Studies have already shown that psilocybin can counter medication-resistant cases of depression and anxiety, and Lecoq says the OpenScope study could suggest ways to fine-tune psychedelic drugs for clinical applications. “The hope is that we can identify which cell type is impacted and understand better how this drug works, perhaps to design more targeted therapeutic substances in the future,” he says.

How does the past shape our present worldview? Researchers from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science will analyze brain activity in mice to understand how the brain’s visual system reacts to changes over time. Lecoq says the researchers were inspired by the Allen Brain Observatory study involving movie-watching mice.

“Our animals were watching a movie [that was playing in] a loop, and they saw that the animals actually learned when the movie goes back to the beginning,” Lecoq says. “They’re essentially asking us to confirm that effect by designing an experiment where you play a movie, but transition from the beginning to the end — and in the middle, there’s a context that changes slowly.”

How does the brain track moving objects? Researchers from the University of Freiburg and the Technical University of Berlin will track how mouse brains process visual data to perceive motion. “They’re interested in how the circuits deal with conflictual motion,” Lecoq says. “If something is going very fast toward you, you’re probably going to notice it immediately, because it’s going at a different speed than the rest of your vision. And this is incredibly important when you want to avoid, like, a tiger jumping onto you that is in the corner of your field of view.”

How do we recognize textures by sight alone? Researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary will use the Allen Brain Observatory to study the role played by the visual cortex in interpreting the look of different textures. The experiment could shed light on how we use visual cues to distinguish between subcategories of objects — for example, different varieties of apples, or different breeds of dogs. “That’s what this project is about,” Lecoq says. “How does the brain disentangle representations of objects as we learn?”

Six years after OpenScope opened for business, Lecoq says the program reflects a new model for neuroscience: “Our platform enhances data acquisition and global sharing, while empowering individual labs to leverage it for their unique scientific pursuits,” he says.

That’s how OpenScope is following through on the open-science approach that Paul Allen championed more than a decade ago. “This is our vision for the future of neuroscience,” Lecoq says.

Jerome Lecoq co-leads of the OpenScope program alongside Christof Koch, a fellow neuroscientist at the Allen Institute. Koch was a featured guest on the Fiction Science podcast in 2021, talking about his psychedelic experience and what such experiences can teach us about the nature of consciousness. If you haven’t listened to that podcast already, check it out.

Take a look at the original version of this item on Cosmic Log for bonus reading recommendations from Jerome Lecoq, and stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.

Decades before the current debates over gender and sexuality, the late Seattle science-fiction writer Vonda N. McIntyre flipped the script on those subjects.

“In many of her stories, there are characters that, by the end of the book, you go, ‘You know, I don’t think it was ever established whether they were male, or female, or something in between,'” fellow science-fiction author Una McCormack says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “And it’s done with such a light touch that you would never notice.”

Five years after McIntyre died of cancer at the age of 70, McCormack is playing a lead role in shining a spotlight of her legacy for a new generation. She helped arrange for the publication of “Little Sisters and Other Stories,” an anthology that includes McIntyre’s first published short story (from 1970), her last piece of published fiction (from 2015) and eight more tales from the decades in between.

McIntyre made her mark on science fiction in several ways: She wrote three novelizations of Star Trek movies (II, III and IV), plus two original Star Trek novels. She founded Seattle’s Clarion West Writers Workshop, which will be celebrating McIntyre and the new anthology with a virtual panel presentation next month.

Perhaps most significantly, McIntyre was part of a movement that brought feminist perspectives to science fiction — and often put women characters at the center of the action. (Another noted Pacific Northwest author, Ursula K. LeGuin, was also part of the movement and frequently collaborated with her.)

McCormack argues that McIntyre’s writings weren’t just about feminism. “She was extremely ahead of the curve in the representation of disability, or ‘other-bodied-ness,'” McCormack says. “In ‘The Exile Waiting’ [McIntyre’s first novel], we see a huge diversity of shape and form that humanity can take. So I think she’s ahead of the curve on a lot of things.”

McIntyre turned to science-fiction writing after studying biology and genetics at the University of Washington — and her interest in those subjects shows through in some of the stories included in “Little Sisters.” (“Elfleda,” for example, is told from the point of view of a genetically engineered centaur who has been created to cater to the whims of tourists.)

McCormack, whose 11th Star Trek novel is due to come out in November, says she got a kick out of how McIntyre wrote about humpback whales in her novelization of “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.”

“The material with Spock meeting the whales, and the whole whale encounter with the alien probe — it’s all wonderful, and radically decenters the humans in the story,” McCormack says. “It’s like they’re not relevant to this.”

The bottom line? Even when McIntyre wasn’t writing about Star Trek, her stories reflected the philosophy that Mister Spock lived by: infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

“What I draw from this is a robust statement of the reality of human diversity,” McCormack says. “We make the case that it’s a good thing — but it’s also a true thing. Humans are diverse. We are diverse in terms of how our bodies move and operate, how they change, in our sexualities, in how we were in the past, how we were in the future. She states this robustly as fact. She doesn’t get into the arguments. It’s the basis on which her stories operate.”

“Little Sisters and Other Stories” by Vonda N. McIntyre is set for release on May 21. Clarion West is presenting “The Roots and Future of Feminist Science Fiction,” a free virtual panel discussion focusing on McIntyre’s work and other major influences on the genre, at 11 a.m. PT on Saturday, June 8. In addition to McCormack, the panelists include Nicola Griffith, SJ Groenewegen and Nisi Shawl. Advance registration is recommended.

The lead illustration is based on a photograph of McIntyre from the Science Fiction Writers of America, which was converted into a watercolor-style artwork by Media.io, and then augmented with images of a “futuristic neon Seattle skyline with the Space Needle” generated by Microsoft Copilot.

Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and currently lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com.

NASA has selected four proposals for climate science missions, including an effort led by a University of Washington researcher, to go forward for further study with millions of dollars in funding.

STRIVE, which has UW atmospheric scientist Lyatt Jaeglé as its principal investigator, would focus on interactions between the stratosphere and the troposphere.

“STRIVE would allow us to see the composition and temperature of the atmosphere with much finer detail than previously possible from space,” Jaeglé told GeekWire in an email. “It would enable us to observe how smoke from fires and volcanoes affect the ozone layer. It would give us needed information to understand how the troposphere and stratosphere interact, and how these interactions influence weather, climate and air quality.”

Jaeglé said “the entire STRIVE team is very excited at the prospect of moving forward in this next step to prepare the concept study.”

The three other studies winning support from NASA’s new Earth System Explorers Program are ODYSEA, EDGE and Carbon-I. Each of the science teams for the four selected proposals will receive $5 million to conduct a one-year concept study.

After the study period, NASA will choose two of the proposals to go forward to launch, with readiness dates expected in 2030 and 2032. For each chosen investigation, the mission cost will be capped at $310 million. That figure doesn’t include launch costs, which will be covered by NASA.

NASA’s Earth System Explorers Program focuses on Earth science questions relating to topics such as greenhouse gases, the ozone layer, ocean surface currents and changes in ice and glaciers around the world.

““The proposals represent another example of NASA’s holistic approach to studying our home planet,” Nicky Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said today in a news release. “As we continue to confront our changing climate, and its impacts on humans and our environment, the need for data and scientific research could not be greater. These proposals will help us better prepare for the challenges we face today, and tomorrow.”

Here are further details about each of the proposals:

• STRIVE (Stratosphere Troposphere Response Using Infrared Vertically-Resolved Light Explorer): This mission would provide daily, near-global, high-resolution measurements of temperature, a variety of atmospheric elements and aerosol properties from the upper troposphere to the mesosphere. It would also measure vertical profiles of ozone and trace gases needed to monitor and understand the recovery of the ozone layer. The science team includes researchers from UW, NorthWest Research Associates, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and other institutions in the U.S. and Canada. Mission partners also include NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems and Leidos.
• ODYSEA (Ocean Dynamics and Surface Exchange With the Atmosphere): This satellite would measure ocean surface currents and winds to improve our understanding of air-sea interactions and surface current processes that impact weather, climate, marine ecosystems and human well-being. The proposal is led by Sarah Gille at the University of California in San Diego.
• EDGE (Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer): This mission would observe the three-dimensional structure of terrestrial ecosystems and the surface topography of glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice as they are changing in response to climate and human activity. The mission would provide a continuation of measurements that are currently made from space by ICESat-2 and GEDI. The proposal is led by UCSD’s Helen Amanda Fricker.
• Carbon-I (The Carbon Investigation): This investigation would enable simultaneous, multi-species measurements of critical greenhouse gases and potential quantification of ethane – which could help study processes that drive natural and human-caused emissions. The proposal is led by Caltech’s Christian Frankenberg.

We’ve updated this report with comments from UW’s Lyatt Jaeglé.

More than 100 researchers — including a Nobel laureate — have signed on to a call for the scientific community to follow a set of safety and security standards when using artificial intelligence to design synthetic proteins.

The community statement on the responsible development of AI for protein design is being unveiled today in Boston at Winter RosettaCon 2024, a conference focusing on biomolecular engineering. The statement follows up on an AI safety summit that was convened last October by the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“I view this as a crucial step for the scientific community,” the institute’s director, David Baker, said in a news release. “The responsible use of AI for protein design will unlock new vaccines, medicines and sustainable materials that benefit the world. As scientists, we must ensure this happens while also minimizing the chance that our tools could ever be misused to cause harm.”

The community statement calls on researchers to conduct safety and security reviews of new AI models for protein design before their release, and to issue reports about their research practices.

It says AI-assisted technologies should be part of a rapid response to biological emergencies such as future pandemics. And it urges researchers to participate in security measures around DNA manufacturing — for example, checking the hazard potential of each synthetic gene sequence before it’s used in research.

The process behind the list of principles and voluntary commitments parallels the Asilomar conference that drew up guidelines for the safe use of recombinant DNA in 1975. “That was our explicit model for the summit we hosted in October,” said Ian Haydon, head of communications for the Institute of Protein Design and a member of the panel that prepared the statement.

Among the first researchers to sign on to the statement is Caltech biochemist Frances Arnold, who won a share of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2018 for pioneering the use of directed evolution to engineer enzymes. Arnold is also a co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, or PCAST.

Other prominent signers include Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientific officer and a member of PCAST; and Harvard geneticist George Church, who’s arguably best-known for his efforts to revive the long-extinct woolly mammoth.

Haydon said other researchers who are active developers of AI technologies for biomolecular structure prediction or design are welcome to add their names to the online list of signatories. There’s a separate list of supporters that anyone can add their name to. (Among the first supporters to put their names on that list are Yann LeCun, vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta; and Mark Dybul, who was U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator under President George W. Bush and is now CEO of Renovaro Biosciences.)

The campaign’s organizers say the fact that a person has signed the statement shouldn’t be read as implying any endorsement by the signer’s institution — and there’s no intent to enforce the voluntary commitments laid out in the statement. That raises a follow-up question: Will the statement have any impact?

“Implementation is the next and most important step,” Haydon told GeekWire in an email. “This new pledge shows that many scientists want to lead the way on this, in consultation with other experts. We anticipate close collaboration between researchers and science funders, publishers and policymakers.”

The Institute for Protein Design is among the world’s leaders in biomolecular engineering: For more than a decade, Baker and his colleagues at the institute have been using computational tools — including a video game — to test out ways in which protein molecules can be folded into “keys” to unlock therapeutic benefits or lock out harmful viruses. In 2019, the institute won a five-year, $45 million grant from the Audacious Project at TED to support its work.

Another leader in the field is Google DeepMind, which used its AlphaFold AI program to predict the 3-D structures of more than 200 million proteins in 2022. DeepMind’s researchers weren’t among the early signers of the community statement; however, Google AI has published its own set of commitments relating to AI research.

“In line with Google’s AI principles, we’re committed to ensuring safe and responsible AI development and deployment,” a Google DeepMind spokesperson told GeekWire in an email. “This includes conducting a comprehensive consultation prior to releasing our protein-folding model AlphaFold, involving a number of external experts.”

Efforts to manage the potential risks of artificial intelligence and maximize the potential benefits have been gathering momentum over the past year:

• Last July, a group of seven tech companies — Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — made a series of voluntary commitments with the White House to develop AI responsibly.
• Last month, the University of Washington announced the appointment of a Task Force on Artificial Intelligence to address the ethical and safety issues surrounding AI and develop a university-wide AI strategy.
• This week, the Washington State Legislature approved a plan to create an Artificial Intelligence Task Force that would help lawmakers better understand the benefits and risks of AI.

Haydon sees the campaign to promote the responsible use of AI in biomolecular design as part of that bigger trend.

“This is far from the only community grappling with the benefits and risks of AI,” he said. “We welcome input from others who are thinking through similar issues. But each niche of AI has its own benefits, risks and complexities. What works for large language models or AI trained on hospital data won’t necessarily apply in domains like chemistry or molecular biology. The challenge will be to create the right solutions for each context.”

We’ve updated this report to reflect the fact that more signatories have signed on to the community statement. 

An international team of scientists has blazed a new trail for studying how atoms respond to radiation, by tracking the energetic movement of electrons when a sample of liquid water is blasted with X-rays.

The experiment, described in this week’s issue of the journal Science, required “freezing” the motion of the atoms with which the electrons were associated, on a scale of mere attoseconds. An attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second — or, expressed another way, a millionth of a trillionth of a second.

Attosecond-scale observations could provide scientists with new insights into how radiation exposure affects objects and people.

“What happens to an atom when it is struck by ionizing radiation, like an X-ray? Seeing the earliest stages of this process has long been a missing piece in understanding how radiation affects matter,” Xiaosong Li, a chemistry professor at the University of Washington and a laboratory fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said in a UW news release. “This new technique for the first time shows us that missing piece and opens the door to seeing the steps where so much complex — and interesting — chemistry occurs!”

Li is one of the senior authors of the Science paper, which describes a technique known as X-ray attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy, or AX-ATAS. The technique uses one X-ray pulse to excite atoms, and follows that with another pulse to probe how the excited atoms responded.

For their experiment, the researchers blasted a thin sheet of water with X-ray laser pulses at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source in California. The AX-ATAS method made it possible for them to track the electrons energized by the X-rays as they moved into an excited state, all before the bulkier atomic nuclei had time to move and blur the picture.

“We now have a tool where, in principle, you can follow the movement of electrons and see newly ionized molecules as they’re formed in real time,” Linda Young, another senior study author who is a professor at the University of Chicago and a distinguished fellow at Argonne National Laboratory, said in a PNNL news release.

Li and Young are among 26 authors of the study published by Science, titled “Attosecond-Pump Attosecond-Probe X-Ray Spectroscopy of Liquid Water.” The authors based in Washington state include Li as well as Carolyn Pearce (PNNL and Washington State University) and Emily Nienhuis (PNNL), Lixin Lu, one of the paper’s principal authors, conducted research for the study as a UW doctoral student and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford. Check out the news releases from UW and PNNL for further details about the study.

Several years ago, scientists at the University of Washington theorized that key ingredients for life could have built up billions of years ago in special kinds of environments known as soda lakes.

At the time, their hypothesis was based on previously published research, computer modeling and lab experiments. But now the same scientists say they’ve found a shallow lake that just might fit the requirements — and it happens to be just a few hundred miles north of their home base in Seattle.

Their findings, focusing on Last Chance Lake in British Columbia, were published this month in Communications Earth & Environment, an open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Last Chance Lake is special for several reasons: First of all, it’s definitely a soda lake — that is, a lake where chemical reactions between the lake’s water and the underlying volcanic rocks give rise to high levels of dissolved sodium and carbonate, similar to dissolved baking soda.

Soda lakes can also have high levels of dissolved phosphate. That’s important, because phosphate is an essential building block for DNA and RNA. It’s also a key component of cell membranes. But in order for phosphate to become incorporated into the molecules of life, it has to be present in concentrations that are up to a million times higher than the levels typically found in rivers, lakes or the ocean.

The lab study published in 2019 suggested that under the right conditions, phosphate concentrations could reach the required level in soda lakes.

“I think these soda lakes provide an answer to the phosphate problem,” David Catling, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences who was an author of the 2019 study as well as the newly published work, said in a news release. “Our answer is hopeful: This environment should occur on the early Earth, and probably on other planets, because it’s just a natural outcome of the way that planetary surfaces are made, and how water chemistry works.”

Catling and his colleagues identified Last Chance Lake as having a good chance of solving the “phosphate problem” based on a nearly 30-year-old research paper that referenced the lake’s extraordinarily high phosphate levels.

The lake is only about a foot deep. Dry, windy conditions on British Columbia’s Cariboo Plateau promote evaporation to keep water levels low while concentrating levels of the lake’s dissolved compounds. By summer’s end, the lake’s water has almost completely evaporated, leaving a murky, muddy mix with a salty crust on top.

“You have this seemingly dry salt flat, but there are nooks and crannies. And between the salt and the sediment there are little pockets of water that are really high in dissolved phosphate,” said lead study author Sebastian Haas, a postdoctoral researcher at UW. “What we wanted to understand was why and when could this happen on the ancient Earth, in order to provide a cradle for the origin of life.”

Researchers collected samples of water, lake sediment and salt crust during three visits to the lake in 2021 and 2022. In most lakes, calcium combines with phosphate to form calcium phosphate, a substance that turns up in milk, bones and tooth enamel. But at Last Chance Lake, the calcium instead combines with carbonate and magnesium to form a mineral called dolomite. That leaves the dissolved phosphate free to rise to concentrations far above typical levels.

Further analysis addressed another question about Last Chance Lake: Why aren’t the organisms that are typically found in lakes taking advantage of all that phosphate?

To find the answer, the research team looked at a nearby body of water called Goodenough Lake. They saw that cyanobacteria in Goodenough Lake were indeed consuming the phosphate and providing natural fertilizer for other forms of life. In contrast, the salt levels in Last Chance Lake were too high for life to gain much of a foothold there.

Places like Last Chance Lake could provide more chances for astrobiologists to test out their hypotheses as they learn more about potentially habitable environments in places ranging from Mars, Europa and Enceladus in our own solar system to Earthlike worlds in far-off planetary systems.

“These new findings will help inform origin-of-life researchers who are either replicating these reactions in the lab or are looking for potentially habitable environments on other planets,” Catling said.

Authors of the study published by Communications Earth & Environment, “Biogeochemical Explanations for the World’s Most Phosphate-Rich Lake, an Origin-of-Life Analog,” are Haas, Catling and UW graduate student Kimberly Poppy Sinclair. Graduate students with the UW Astrobiology Program also assisted with sample collection. The research was funded by the Simons Foundation.

The halls at a recent meeting of biologists in Seattle were buzzing with more than just the usual excitement about spiders, bats, bees, elephants and other creatures.

Researchers were also talking about the increased use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, at the the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.

Such methods have life science applications beyond biomedical fields such as protein design, a more well-known use case. Researchers are leveraging AI to study how animals move their bodies, migrate, sense their environment, behave, and more.

“AI and machine learning methods are being used in diverse sub-disciplines in biology — from neuroscience, molecular biology, to animal behavior,” Jeff Riffell, a professor in the Biology Department at the University of Washington, told GeekWire.

Riffell and his colleagues presented an AI-powered system to study how insects detect odors in their environment. Their machine learning model predicts how moth neurons respond to different mixtures of smelly chemicals.

Shir Bar, who studies the intersection of biology and computer vision at Tel Aviv University, told GeekWire that she’s seeing more studies using AI for animal detection, tracking and behavioral classification, as well as in biomechanics for pose estimation (detecting position using computer vision methods).

Bar spoke at the meeting about how scientists can leverage AI, noting that entering the arena and finding the right tools for the task can be daunting. We asked Bar to identify some of the more outstanding AI/ML studies at the meeting, held earlier this month.

Bumblebee cooling

When the weather gets hot, bees keep the colony cool by fanning their wings. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin study this behavior by labeling individual bumblebees and tracking them with an automated imaging system while exposing them to high temperatures that simulate a three-day heatwave. The scientists integrate the tracking of individual bees with deep learning-based identification of fanning behavior. They are now using the system to test how bees respond to heat under different nutrient conditions. The research may help scientists understand how bees respond to climate change.

Insect treadmills

Researchers at Imperial College London place insects on small treadmills to measure how they move. At the meeting they also presented a synthetic dataset on such movement using three-dimensional models of insects, generated by a gaming engine, said Bar. According to the presenters, insects inspire researchers developing six-legged walking robots. After all, many insects can walk on ceilings and walls keep on going even if they lose limbs.

“This is a really innovative way to tackle the lack of training data that’s so prevalent in our field, especially since they are building a general system that is meant to work on diverse species of insects,” said Bar of the presentation.

Zebra tracking

An open-source tool to help capture animal behavior in the wild was showcased at the meeting by researchers at the University of Stuttgart and Princeton University. Smarter-labelme labels data used to train machine learning models, reducing the need to manually annotate datasets on animal movement. The researchers used the tool to quantify the activity of zebras from drone footage over large swaths of the savannah.

Seeing green

Scientists routinely label cellular molecules using green fluorescent protein (GFP), a laboratory tool originally derived from a jellyfish. Different color variants can arise from mutations in GFP, but exactly how has been unclear. Researchers have now developed a neural network model to predict the intensity of fluorescence from the underlying mutations in GFP, using protein folding parameters and other inputs. The approach could lead to the development of improved ways to visualize cellular molecules. This study was undertaken at the University of Maryland and the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Neuroscientists have unveiled their most comprehensive and detailed map of cell types across the entire mouse brain, delivering the latest results of a six-year-long scientific effort in which Seattle’s Allen Institute has played a leading role.

Nine studies published today in the journal Nature document the identification of 5,322 different types of brain cells, and trace the similarities and differences found in a variety of mammalian species — including humans.

The work expands upon previous studies from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, including earlier surveys of cells in various regions of the mouse brain, as well as cross-species comparisons of cell functions. Researchers from the Allen Institute joined forces with colleagues from the Broad Institute, Harvard, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the University of California at San Diego, UC-Berkeley and other institutions to add to their “parts list” for the brain.

“Now we have the cell-type atlas of all the cells in the brain,” Hongkui Zeng, executive vice president and director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said in an explanatory video. “This is really a landmark achievement. … It marks the completion of a kind of work that strives for completeness. But it also marks the beginning of the next phase of the journey. It just opens up the door for the next generation of investigations.”

Zeng, who is the senior author of one of the papers in Nature and a co-author of five others, said the next step will be to figure out exactly what all those different cell types do, how their functions are affected by disease, and whether there might be yet-to-be-discovered ways to restore those proper functions.

“It’s not just about a catalog, a list of cell types and where they are — reference information which by itself is already important — but we begin to see how a brain is organized,” Zeng said.

The studies relied on genetic sequencing data plus spatial maps of gene expression, gathered from millions of cells.

Researchers found a strong correlation between the characteristic gene expression patterns for cell types and their location in the brain. In the upper regions of the brain, also known as the dorsal regions, there was a small number of widely diverse cell types. In contrast, the brain’s lower or ventral regions contain a large number of distinct cell types that are more closely related to each other.

“Our hypothesis is an evolution-based explanation,” Zeng told GeekWire in an email. “The evolutionally more ancient, ventral part of the brain (especially the hypothalamus / midbrain / hindbrain) is mainly involved in the survival function of the animal (including feeding, reproduction, metabolism, etc.), and thus it is subject to more evolutionary constraints, and its cell types are more numerous but haven’t diverged much.”

In contrast, the dorsal part of the brain — including the cortex, thalamus and cerebellum — is mainly involved in fast-changing adaptive functions, such as sensory-motor specialization and cognition. “Thus it has expanded and diversified faster, even with fewer millions of years of evolution,” Zeng said.

Another study compared gene regulation in the primary motor cortex of humans, macaques, monkeys and mice. Researchers found that patterns of gene expression that were specific to particular cell types seem to have evolved much more rapidly than patterns that are shared across different cell types.

They said nearly 80 percent of the regulatory elements that are unique to humans are transposable elements — that is, small sections of DNA that can easily change position within the genome.

The analysis also pointed to features that are highly conserved across species in genetic variants that have been linked to multiple sclerosis, anorexia nervosa and tobacco addiction. The researchers said their results demonstrate the value of brain maps for identifying genetic factors that play a part in neurological conditions.

“Humans have evolved over millions of years, and much of that evolutionary history is shared with other animals,” Joseph Ecker, a professor at the Salk Institute who helped lead the cross-species study, explained in a news release. “Data from humans alone is never going to be enough to tell us everything we want to know about how the brain works. By filling in these gaps with other mammalian species, we can continue to answer those questions and improve the machine learning models we use by providing them more data.”

Now that researchers have filled out the parts list for the mouse brain, they’ll be devoting even more attention to the human brain. The Allen Institute is spearheading a five-year effort to create a human cell-type atlas with $173 million in funding from the BRAIN Initiative.

Zeng said cell-type maps are likely to point to new strategies for treating diseases. In that sense, having an accurate map could be the first step toward putting a wayward brain back on the right track.

“We know that many of the diseases originated actually in specific parts of the brain, and probably in specific cell types in those parts of the brain,” she said. “With the map in hand, now we can find out exactly how genes changed in those cell types, in those parts of the brain. … We can then create genetic tools or other kinds of tools, like pharmacological tools, to target those specific cell types.”

John Ngai, director of the BRAIN Initiative, suggested that the best is yet to come.

“Where we previously stood in darkness, this milestone achievement shines a bright light, giving researchers access to the location, function, and pathways between cell types and cell groups in a way we couldn’t imagine previously,” Ngai said. “This product is a testament to the power of this unprecedented, cross-cutting collaboration and paves our path for more precision brain treatments.”

A special section on Nature’s website highlights research from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network relating to the mouse brain-cell atlas, including the nine papers published today as well as a paper that was published in September.

The Allen Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the University of Washington have launched a collaboration called the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, with the goal of using genetically modified cells to capture a DNA-based record showing how they change over time.

If the project works out as hoped, it could lead to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind cellular processes — including, for example, how tumors grow — and point to new methods for fighting disease and promoting healthy cell growth.

Over the next five years, the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology will receive $35 million from the Allen Institute, and another $35 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Jay Shendure, a professor of genome sciences at UW Medicine, will serve as the hub’s executive director. Other members of the leadership team include Marion Pepper and Cole Trapnell, researchers at UW Medicine; and Jesse Gray, a veteran of Ascidian Therapeutics and Harvard Medical School. The collaboration will build on technology pioneered at the Allen Discovery Center for Cell Lineage Tracing and the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine.

Shendure compared the genetically modified cells to flight recorders on airplanes. He said such cells could, for example, be combined with CAR-T cells to track the progress of cancer therapy.

“You could imagine layering them into CAR-T cells to provide a record of what happened, in the context of trying to deliver a certain therapeutic,” he told GeekWire. “And then you could imagine components of these cells, or more sophisticated versions, actually being used as part of the therapy — where, when and how a therapeutic turns on or off is modulated at some level by a much more sophisticated set of machinery.”

A new channel for checking cells

That sort of application is far down the road. In the nearer term, SeaHub’s researchers aim to develop a new channel for chronicling the changes that cells go through. This channel would take an approach that’s different from existing methods that depend on microscope imaging or sequencing a cell’s entire genome.

Shendure and his colleagues at UW have already created two techniques that could help turn elements of the genetic machinery inside cells into tiny time-lapse recording devices.

One of the techniques, known as DNA Typewriter, was the subject of a research paper in the journal Nature last year. The system makes use of gene-editing tools to lay down short snippets of DNA in chronological order, moving along a molecular string like the clicks of the carriage on an old-fashioned typewriter.

“If you insert a five-base-pair sequence, that’s four to the fifth, or 1,024. So there are 1,024 possible symbols that we could insert,” Shendure said. “When you punch a key, so to speak, you write a symbol — one of those 1,024 possible insertions. That’s like the recording of information. And the same edit moves the ‘type head’ one unit down the tape. You’re not just firing letters at a piece of paper, you’re actually typing them in some coherent order.”

The second technique is Engram. “Without Engram, DNA Typewriter is like a monkey at a typewriter, just hitting keys,” Shendure said. “But with Engram, at least for some of the keys, we can say you’re more likely to type this key if this particular signaling pathway is active, or you’re only going to type this key if you’re this particular cell type. So, we’re starting to learn how to assign meanings to keys, and to build a vocabulary of triggers between biological signals and symbols on our keyboard.”

To read the recording, researchers could extract some of the recorder cells and check the sequence of DNA letters that were inserted over time.

What the recorders could reveal

Early practical applications of the cell-recording technologies are likely to focus on studying how cells multiply and develop into tissues under normal conditions, and how things go wrong due to disease.

Studying the growth of a cancerous tumor would be a great example, Shendure said. “If you want to probe the history of one tumor — obviously this would be in a model organism, but it could be a human cell transplanted in a mouse — trying to accumulate that history over time is something that you would want to do,” he said.

Researchers could track the development of different tumors on the cellular level, and study how different treatment strategies affect their growth. For that scenario, a strain of mice could be genetically engineered with cell-recording capability.

“We make a mouse line that essentially has all this stuff stably, and the recording device can be ‘turned on’ at any point,” Shendure said. “You could have it constituently on, so it switches on at the beginning, or you could use a small chemical to turn it on, like doxycycline.”

Such methods could also be used to fine-tune tissue engineering. “If we’re trying to make skin in a dish, or something like that, what’s working? What’s not working? And how do you modulate it to improve the process?” Shendure said.

Using such techniques for clinical treatment in humans is a long-term strategy. But how long-term? “I don’t think they’re as futuristic as they might seem, given everything that’s going on,” Shendure said.

Sharing the science

Findings from the research effort will be shared widely within the scientific community. “It’s all going to be open science, fitting with the philosophy of the Allen Institute and CZI,” Shendure said.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s backing for the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology builds on the philanthropic organization’s history of supporting big-picture biotech projects — including a $3 billion effort aimed at curing, preventing and managing all diseases within a generation, and $15 million in grants that were awarded in 2018 to support a global research effort called the Human Cell Atlas.

“By developing new technologies to measure and understand the history of our cells over time, including how they are impacted by the environment around them, genetic mutations and other factors, we can expand scientists’ understanding of what happens at the cellular level when we go from healthy to sick, and help pinpoint the earliest causes of disease,” CZI co-founder and co-CEO Priscilla Chan said in a news release.

Rui Costa, president and chief executive officer of the Allen Institute, said he and his colleagues are “incredibly excited to enter this new era of collaboration to tackle big moonshot projects in partnership with others.”

UW President Ana Mari Cauce said the project “demonstrates the enormous potential impact of values-driven partnerships, and it represents a new way of thinking about how we can solve problems more quickly and effectively through scientific collaboration.”

“Our shared values, paired with our complementary perspectives and strengths, are a recipe for success, and I can’t wait to see what this team will accomplish together,” Cauce said.

The effort should yield noticeable results within five years, Shendure said.

“It could lead to basically a library of tools for engineering cell types, specific expression, et cetera. … I think there’ll be these deliverables that are broadly useful for the field,” he said.

Shendure hopes researchers at the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology will come up with specific bodies of information relating to cell lineages, including cancer cell lineages, that would be impossible to obtain using more conventional technologies. But he also has a bigger goal in mind: “Gaining acceptance for a new modality of measuring things over time, using DNA as a recording medium.”

“That’s been kind of a niche interest of technology development groups,” Shendure said. “We’re trying to really move that toward the mainstream.”

Some of the biggest names in longevity research — and at least one Seattle biotech startup — say they’ll enter a $101 million, seven-year competition to turn back the clock on the effects of aging by at least 10 years.

XPRIZE Healthspan was unveiled today at a conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It’s the richest incentive-based technology competition ever created by the XPRIZE foundation, beating out a $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal contest that’s being funded by Elon Musk, the world’s richest (and most controversial) billionaire.

The top prize in the Healthspan competition will go to the team that does the best job of creating a therapy that can be administered in a year or less, leading to the restoration of at least 10 years’ worth of muscular function, cognition and immune function in people aged 65 to 80.

Peter Diamandis, the founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE, said the concept started out as a longevity prize, but the program’s planners “realized that the idea of waiting 20 years to see if someone won the prize was probably impractical.”

“We shifted from longevity to really looking at age reversal first, and then functional restoration second,” Diamandis explained. “You see, it doesn’t really matter what your epigenetic age is. Do you actually feel younger? Do you have the muscle, immune and cognition that you had 10 or 20 years ago? Because at the end of the game, that’s what really matters.”

The guidelines for the competition are still being fine-tuned, but team can already start registering to compete via the XPRIZE Healthspan website. Two years into the program, judges would select up to 40 teams to receive $250,000 progress awards. After three or four years, up to 10 teams would each receive a $1 million award to keep going.

The grand prize would be paid out by 2030 if key milestones for functional restoration are reached. If one of the teams restores 20 years’ worth of function, that team would be eligible to win $81 million. If the best team can manage only 15 years’ worth of restoration, the prize would amount to $71 million. And if the top team achieves a functional improvement amounting to at least 10 years, but less than 15 years, the prize would be $61 million.

In addition to the $101 million prize purse, $40 million has been set aside to cover the cost of operations. Hevolution, a Saudi foundation focusing on longevity research, is providing $40 million to fund the program. Lululemon founder Chip Wilson kicked in another $26 million. Sixteen other donors, including Diamandis, made additional pledges.

Wilson is also funding a separate $10 million competition to promote the development of therapies that can restore at least 10 years’ worth of muscular function in patients with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, or FSHD — a genetic disorder that affects Wilson and 870,000 others around the world.

Jamie Justice, an adjunct professor focusing on geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, is the executive director of XPRIZE Healthspan. She said the competition comes at a key moment for the study of aging and longevity.

“Our life expectancy has more than doubled in the last 100 years … but our healthy life has not increased at the same rate,” she said. “And so, currently there is about a 10-year period that we now spend at the end of life in poor health. That’s the lost decade that we need novel, innovative solutions in order to make up. And that’s what this prize is really well-poised to do.”

Diamandis hoped hundreds of teams would sign up to compete. “We had 1,600 teams enter our last $100 million prize,” he noted. “I hope we can exceed that.”

Is the goal of the prize achievable? Or will XPRIZE Healthspan end up like the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, in which no team was able to win the grand prize for a commercial lunar landing by the 2018 deadline?

Matt Kaeberlein thinks XPRIZE Healthspan is likely to be successful. He’s an affiliate professor at the University of Washington who has long studied the biological mechanism of aging, and he’s also the co-founder and CEO of a Seattle-based health tech startup called OptiSpan. Like the latest XPRIZE program, OptiSpan focuses on technologies that can help people live healthy lives for a longer time.

Kaeberlein likes what he’s seen so far about the XPRIZE program. “I had nothing to do with this prize or the way they designed it,” he said. “I was a little nervous before it came out, that this would be something crazy that didn’t make any sense. But I think they actually did a good job in the way that they put this together.”

He could see several ways the prize could be won — for example, through the use of anti-aging drugs, or supplements, or even an app-based program that could reliably coax people to adopt healthy habits relating to diet and exercise. (A drug called rapamycin is already being studied for potential life-extension properties.)

Kaeberlein doesn’t yet know if OptiSpan will pursue the prize. “I haven’t actually spent much time thinking about competing,” he told GeekWire. “I don’t know. Maybe, but probably not.”

In contrast, Mitchell Lee, the CEO and co-founder of another Seattle startup called Ora Biomedical, is definitely in. “You better believe that Ora Biomedical is running after that prize!” he said in a posting to X / Twitter.

In a follow-up email, Lee told GeekWire that he and his small team were “very excited” to hear about XPRIZE Healthspan. “We fully believe small-molecule interventions that target biological aging are the next revolution in health,” Lee said. “We developed our WormBot-AI drug discovery platform with the goal of identifying the most powerful lifespan-extending interventions.”

Lee explained that part of Ora Biomedical’s process involves testing compounds across models for age-associated conditions and rare diseases, including neuromuscular disorders. The results are then analyzed to gauge the effects on healthy lifespan.

“The XPRIZE Healthspan is an incredible challenge that stands to revolutionize health,” Lee said. “Ora Biomedical is proud to do all we can to meet the goal of creating transformative longevity therapeutics.”

Ora Biomedical is likely to face tough competition. Several researchers in the field of aging said during today’s XPRIZE presentation that they intend to compete.

The speakers included Andrea Maier, director of the Center for Healthy Longevity at the National University of Singapore and founder of Chi Longevity; Laura Niedernhofer, director of the Institute on the Biology of Aging and Metabolism at the University of Minnesota; and Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging (which has brought on Seattle bioscience pioneer Lee Hood as chief innovation officer).

Perhaps the best-known presumptive competitor is Harvard geneticist George Church, who co-founded a longevity startup called Rejuvenate Bio. Church said the XPRIZE Healthspan “can definitely be won in the timeframe we have here,” thanks to cutting-edge technologies including stem-cell reprogramming, gene editing and AI-enabled molecular analysis.

When Church was asked whether he wanted to win, he said, “Yes, as part of a team effort. The sooner, the better.”

But Kaeberlein said he’d be wary of approaches that are overly rushed. “I would be nervous that there’d be people who try to push things too fast,” he said.

The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, a division of the Seattle-based Allen Institute, is launching a research center in New York to focus on interactions between the nervous system and the immune system.

The Allen Discovery Center for Neuroimmune Interactions, headquartered at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, will receive $10 million over the course of four years from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, with a total potential for $20 million over eight years.

The award is the result of an open call for research proposals exploring fundamental questions at the intersection of neuroscience and immunology. It’s the latest open-science initiative celebrating the legacy of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died five years ago at the age of 65 from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Several other Allen Discovery Centers have been created over the years to focus on fields including human brain evolution and cell lineages.

“Understanding of the complex crosstalk that occurs between peripheral nervous and immune systems will provide this emerging field with an exciting opportunity to change the way we think about physiology at this dynamic interface, both in health and disease,” Kathy Richmond, who is executive vice president and director of the Frontiers Group and the Office of Science and Innovation at the Allen Institute, said today in a news release.

The neuroimmunology research center will be led by Brian Kim of Mount Sinai and David Artis of Weill Cornell Medicine. They’ll bring together a multidisciplinary team to trace interactions between the nervous system and the immune system that occur at sites distant from the brain — for example, at the skin, lung and gut surfaces — and analyze how those interactions relay sensations back to the brain and regulate organ physiology and immune responses.

Kim said the center’s goal will be “to exponentially accelerate the frontier of neuroimmunology by bringing together the pioneers who helped shape the emerging field.”

Artis said the team will include researchers from Mount Sinai, New York University, Weill Cornell Medicine and Yale. The effort represents “a tremendous opportunity to leverage cutting-edge technologies to provide new insights into how the nervous and immune systems communicate with each other to regulate immunity, inflammation and tissue homeostasis,” he said.

If the center lives up to its promise, the resulting research could “transform numerous fields of biology and medicine, including allergy, autoimmunity, cancer, infection and metabolism,” Kim said.

Plenty of high school students plan to make careers out of coding when they graduate from college. And plenty of other students are probably planning careers as cancer-research scientists. 

But how many are planning on doing both at once?

“Coding for Cancer,” a program from the Seattle-based Fred Hutch Cancer Center, aims to let students know that computational research in the biomedical field is one potential career path, and that coding skills play a very important part in modern cancer research.

Raihan Hakim, a junior at the Overlake School in Remond, Wash., completed the Coding for Cancer program over the summer. Working with other students and two Fred Hutch computational biomedical researchers who served as mentors, he completed a coding project exploring how gene mutations relate to cancerous tumors in the body.

“I plotted each patient’s different cancer types, and I put that against whether they had [the mutation] or not, and what stage they were at,” Hakim said.

The project culminated in a Zoom presentation where all the Coding for Cancer teams presented their methods and findings — along with some of their missteps.

Hakim said the program opened his mind to the possibilities of coding and technology outside of more obvious career paths like gaming and app development.

“One thing I learned over the course of the program is how technology can be used in many spaces, especially cancer research,” Hakim said. “It makes our lives easier by doing the work for us.”

Hakim already knew a coding language before enrolling in the program, but that’s by no means a prerequisite for students interested in participating. Coding for Cancer is designed to expose students to the possibilities of using code in cancer research with no prior knowledge of computational science. Mentors teach coding during the first two weeks of the four-week program; the next two are devoted to research.

Hanako Osuga, the program’s lead at Fred Hutch, said an ability to thrive in a virtual learning environment is a better indicator of success in the program than any previous knowledge.

“Virtual programming is a bit difficult at times,” Osuga said. “Anyone who has that curiosity and the drive to learn that skill is more than welcome, and would be a great addition to this program.” 

The program seeks out students from backgrounds historically excluded from the biomedical sciences, and program staff will work with students to secure technological resources — computers or Wi-Fi, for example — that they might not have readily available. 

Students receive a $1,000 stipend after completing the program.

Because the program is virtual, it can reach a larger geographical area, including rural areas of Washington state. This year, three of the program’s 20 students were from central Washington, and one was from eastern Washington.

The goal is to reach students early, to teach them about the possibilities of coding in biomedical sciences before college sets them on other career paths.

“We learned that high schoolers have questions and curiosities around those computational pathways,” Osuga said. “College is almost a little bit too late.” 

Hakim hasn’t settled on what to study in college, or how to apply that skillset down the road. But the program has changed his perspective. 

“Cancer research was always a thing I wanted to do. That was one of the main reasons I applied,” he said. “The unique part was the coding language. I feel like after doing this program, that could be a possibility.”

Students interested in applying for Coding for Cancer’s 2024 cohort should check the program website in early January for updated instructions.

Twenty years after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen created the bioscience research center that bears his name, Seattle’s Allen Institute is still pushing out into new frontiers. But this weekend, the nonprofit institute — and its hometown — are taking a little time to celebrate.

All this week, the Allen Institute has been highlighting Open Science Week, which touches upon one of the core values that Allen had in mind when he launched the institute with a $100 million donation on Sept. 16, 2003. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Dow Constantine are giving the festivities an extra boost by issuing proclamations designating Saturday as “Open Science Day” in the Emerald City and its environs.

Speaking of emeralds, a gaggle of Seattle landmarks will be lit up in emerald green this weekend in honor of the institute’s 20th anniversary. The list includes the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, Two Union Square, the Great Wheel, the Pacific Science Center, the Seattle Convention Center, Rainier Square — and of course, the Allen Institute’s seven-story headquarters on South Lake Union.

On Sept. 28, the institute is planning a free public event to showcase the open-science discoveries and tools that have emerged over the past 20 years. (Check the institute’s website to sign up for in-person or virtual attendance.)

Back in 2003, the institute was devoted exclusively to brain science, with the goal of creating the Allen Brain Atlas and mapping the role of genes in brain development. The institute’s researchers began by analyzing thin slices of mouse brains, and leveraged the expertise they gained to produce gene-coded maps of the human brain starting in 2010.

Brain science is still a focus of the institute’s research, but over the years, its mission has expanded. Cell science was added to the portfolio in 2014, and just after Paul Allen’s death in 2018, the institute launched an immunology division with $125 million from the software billionaire’s estate. The most recent addition is the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, which was created in 2021.

An organizationally separate counterpart focusing on artificial intelligence — the Allen Institute for AI, or AI2 — was founded in 2014.

Neuroscientist Rui Costa, who was named the institute’s CEO and president in late 2021, told GeekWire that Jody Allen, Paul Allen’s sister and the executor and trustee of his estate, has been “extremely supportive” of the institute. So has the rest of the institute’s board of directors.

“They say, ‘Let’s go for the next 20 years of impact,'” Costa said.

The institute’s staff is on track to rise beyond 800 employees by the end of the year. Its treasure trove of scientific data is at the 500-petabyte level and on its way to reaching an exabyte (that’s a quintillion bytes, or a billion gigabytes) sometime next year. “By 2024, the data that we’ve produced will be on the scale of what CERN has provided for particle physics,” Costa said.

So what are the institute’s biggest achievements? Costa says he has three favorites: the publication of the first Allen Mouse Brain Atlas in 2006, this year’s characterization of what a normal cell should look like … and a discovery that Costa can’t talk about yet because it’s awaiting publication.

“Perhaps bigger than any individual discovery, our most monumental achievement has been advancing the open science movement,” Costa added.

All of the institute’s databases are open-source and freely available to outside researchers, the way Paul Allen intended them to be. “More publications have been produced by outside institutions using our data than what we’ve produced internally,” Costa said. “We think that’s a good thing.”

Twenty years ago, the open-science approach to sharing research was uncommon. “And then it became a thing,” Costa said. “Now we are in a position where we’re doubling down on the concept. We go for complete projects that cannot be handled by an individual lab, but rather by interdisciplinary teams that work together for 10 to 15 years on the project.”

In addition to its four research divisions, the Allen Institute forges partnerships with other research centers through its Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group. The ranks of Allen Distinguished Investigators include Nobel-winning gene editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna and Nobel-winning evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo. “We complete projects and change questions, but we don’t change super-fast,” Costa said. “We focus on what we think are the most pertinent questions, and then dive in deep.”

Now the institute is considering research questions having to do with how environmental factors and climate change affect life, how synthetic biology can be used to gain new insights into human health and disease, and how neuroscience can shed light on issues relating to mental health and addiction. There’s currently an open call for proposals to study the neurobiological effects of human-caused environmental changes — with up to $10 million to be awarded to the research team that’s selected.

What would Paul Allen, the self-described “Idea Man,” think of all this?

“When the Allen Institute was founded two decades ago, it began with brain science and a quest to map all of the genes in the mouse brain, and share our data for free,” Costa said in an email. “That was followed by launching new institutes for cell science, immunology and neural dynamics. Today, I believe Paul would marvel at the growing convergence of these different disciplines, and the incredible new computational tools that will help us make discoveries that — just 20 years ago — seemed nearly impossible.”

Tiny robots developed at the University of Washington might look like leaves that could have fallen from a tree, but the control the devices use in getting to the ground is what sets them apart.

The little “microfliers” use a form of origami called the Miura-ori fold, named for Japanese astrophysicist Kōryō Miura, who developed the method for folding a flat sheet of paper into a smaller area.

After being dropped by a drone, the devices go from flat and tumbling to the ground, to folded and falling straight down. The timing of the transition from flat to folded is controlled by a few methods: an onboard pressure sensor (estimating altitude), an onboard timer or a Bluetooth signal.

Each device weighs about 400 milligrams and can travel about 100 yards when dropped from a height of 131 feet. The microfliers carry an onboard battery-free actuator, a solar power-harvesting circuit and controller to trigger the shape changes in mid-air.

The microfliers have the capacity to carry onboard sensors to survey temperature, humidity and other data while soaring, to measure various environmental and atmospheric conditions as they descend. A network of such devices could help researchers paint a picture of what’s happening for different applications, including digital agriculture and monitoring climate change, according to the researchers’ website.

The team published results of its research on Wednesday in Science Robotics.

“Using origami opens up a new design space for microfliers,” said co-senior author Vikram Iyer, UW assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, in a statement. He said the method “highly energy efficient” and said it “allows us to have battery-free control over microflier descent, which was not possible before.”

Iyer, a former GeekWire Geek of the Week, has been involved in several high-profile projects at the UW using tiny robots featuring low power and low weight.

• He helped attach a tiny robotic camera to the back of a live beetle in 2020.
• He put tiny tracking technology on Asian giant hornets in Washington state to help find their nests.
• And before origami became their latest technique, Iyer and researchers were mimicking dandelion seeds riding the wind.

Additional co-authors on the paper are Kyle Johnson and Vicente Arroyos, both UW doctoral students in the Allen School; Amélie Ferran, a UW doctoral student in the mechanical engineering department; Raul Villanueva, Dennis Yin and Tilboon Elberier, who completed this work as UW undergraduate students studying electrical and computer engineering; Alberto Aliseda, UW professor of mechanical engineering; Sawyer Fuller, UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering; and Shyam Gollakota, UW professor in the Allen School.

Watch Johnson demonstrate how to fold a paper microflier in this video:

As the world’s best-known fictional archaeologist goes after what may be his last ancient mystery in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” new generations of real-life archaeologists are ready to dig in with 21st-century technologies and sensibilities.

Harrison Ford, the 80-year-old actor who’s played Indiana Jones for 42 years, has said “Dial of Destiny” will be his last sequel in the series. And this one is a doozy: The dial-like gizmo that gives the movie its name is the Antikythera Mechanism, a real-life device that ancient Greeks used to predict eclipses and other astronomical events. The Lance of Longinus, the Tomb of Archimedes and the Ear of Dionysius figure in the plot as well.

Indy and his mysteries will be missed. Sara Gonzalez, a curator of archaeology at Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, says her favorite movie about her own field is “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the 1981 film in which Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford) made his debut. But that’s not because it’s true to life.

Gonzalez said researchers from the University of Washington’s Department of Anthropology, where she’s an associate professor, recently took a field trip to a local cinema where “Raiders” was playing.

“They have something called HeckleVision, where you can text onto the screen and see it,” she said. “There was this great, fun discussion, happening virtually live, with a whole bunch of anthropologists sitting and watching a movie that we love to deride. But we still kind of love the story and the angle, and we also love educating people about what’s real and what’s fictional about archaeology.”

That’s the subject of the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, focusing on the intersection of science and fiction.

Some of the tools available to modern archaeologists would have seemed like science fiction to Indiana Jones’ real-life contemporaries in the 1930s. Researchers are using satellite images, muon detectors and bug-sized cameras to identify and explore ancient ruins in Egypt. Underwater archaeologists employ side-scan sonar, remotely operated vehicles and 3-D imaging to check out shipwrecks in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the Canadian Arctic. And X-ray scans helped scientists figure out how the Antikythera Mechanism worked.

Closer to home, Gonzalez and her students use magnetometers, ground-penetrating radar and laser-equipped drones to check out sites of archaeological interest, in partnership with indigenous peoples like the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians in California.

“In ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ you have hundreds if not thousands of people excavating everything,” she said. “That’s really not what we like to do in contemporary archaeology, and it’s certainly not very consistent with the values of indigenous nations.”

Her team developed a new technique for doing a minimally invasive excavations, called “catch and release.” The technique involves carefully peeling back the sod on a square meter’s worth of land, removing and cataloging material layer by layer to a depth of 10 centimeters (4 inches), then replacing everything where it was and closing up the hole.

“We were talking about the method, and I was like, ‘So it’s kind of like catch and release,’ and we all joked, because a lot of us really love fishing,” Gonzalez recalled. “It just stuck, and it’s evocative of exactly what we’re doing.”

Gonzalez has found that digging a hole and flying a drone (or cracking a bullwhip, for that matter) aren’t the most important skills that an archaeologist must master.

“I think the No. 1 rule of doing archaeology and becoming an archaeologist is that you really have to like people … and not just working with other archaeologists, but people within the local communities where you’re working,” she said.

The Burke Museum has had a lot of experience working with the tribes of the Pacific Northwest — most notably in the case of the Ancient One, a.k.a. Kennewick Man, whose 9,000-year-old remains were laid to rest in 2017 after more than two decades of legal wrangling. The Burke Museum was the caretaker of the remains for most of that time, and facilitated their handover to a coalition of five tribes.

Gonzalez noted that she joined the museum’s staff years after the Ancient One was repatriated, but she said the case illustrates how archaeology has evolved since the era depicted in the Indiana Jones movies.

“When the Ancient One comes up, usually I try to focus on another case, such as all the other cases that involve very ancient native ancestors who didn’t end up in the courts,” she said. As an example, she cited the process that followed the discovery of 10,000-year-old human remains in Alaska’s On Your Knees Cave in 1996.

“Archaeologists and community members were able to find a pathway forward that recognized the sovereignty of those nations to make decisions about their ancestors,” Gonzalez said.

The $99 million retooling that resulted in a brand-new Burke Museum building in 2019 provided an opportunity to give the region’s indigenous peoples more of a say in how their story is presented. “Our Material World exhibit that features archaeology at the Burke … was developed in close collaboration with tribal partners across the Pacific Northwest, and especially here in Washington,” Gonzalez said.

One of the Burke’s featured archaeological projects focuses on a Coast Salish canoe that was found eroding out of the banks of the Green River south of Seattle in 1963. Researchers created a digital 3-D model of the canoe and used radiocarbon dating to determine its age. “We think it was probably made in the 1830s to 1840s,” Peter Lape, another archaeologist at the Burke, told University of Washington Magazine.

“Right now, if you come by, you’ll seen the canoe in the process of conservation, and we’re getting it ready to put on display,” Gonzalez said.

The Burke Museum also worked with Native carvers and artists to create a replica of the Green River canoe, which is currently stored at the university’s ASUW Shell House. “Our UW canoe family now paddles it,” Gonzalez said. “So do the archaeologists, on occasion.”

“It’s a really fantastic kind of story about how these collections are brought to life when you’re actually working in partnership with people and ensuring that that knowledge goes back into community and into a living practice.”

That sounds like a lesson that the fictional Indiana Jones might benefit from learning, if there’s at least one more ancient mystery to make a movie about.

“It’s definitely the main takeaway,” Gonzalez said. Then she added with a grin, “I would also say that a lot of archaeologists still really advocate punching Nazis and fascists. That’s definitely a cultural touchstone amongst the community.”

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” opens at theaters tonight. The four previous Indiana Jones movies — “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” — are playing on Disney+.

Check out an extended version of this story at Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log for more insights into how archaeology has changed since the fictional days of Indiana Jones, from archaeologists Chris Begley and Brittany Brown.

Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Google, Overcast, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, Radio Public and Podvine. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.

The U.S. Coast Guard says it plans to recover debris from OceanGate’s Titan submersible, which was lost along with its crew during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck, as part of its investigation into the catastrophe.

“At this time, the priority of the investigation is to recover items from the seafloor,” Capt. Jason Neubauer, who is leading the marine board of investigation, said today during a Boston news briefing.

Debris from the submersible lies about 12,500 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, about 400 miles from the Newfoundland coast and only about 1,600 feet from the Titanic’s bow. The sub, built by Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, was on its way to the world’s best-known shipwreck when it lost contact with its support ship a week ago.

An international search-and-rescue operation made use of remotely operated vehicles to find debris from the Titan sub on Thursday. ROVs also will be used to recover wreckage from Titan. “I’m not going to give the details of what the recovery has been to date, but the resources are on site and capable of recovering the debris,” Neubauer told reporters.

The National Transportation Safety Board and its counterparts in Canada, Britain and France are working with the Coast Guard on the investigation.

Neubauer said the nature of the evidence would not be discussed as it was being collected, out of respect for the families of the five crew members who were lost as well as for the various agencies participating in the investigation. The Coast Guard is in communication with the families, and Neubauer said the recovery team was “taking all precautions on site if we are to encounter any human remains.”

The crew members included OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush; veteran Titanic diver PH Nargeolet; British aerospace executive Hamish Harding; and Pakistani business executive Shahzana Dawood and his son, Suleman.

When the pieces of debris from Titan were found on Thursday, the Coast Guard said the crew died due to the catastrophic implosion of the submersible’s hull — and the causes of that implosion are likely to become key issues in the investigation.

In addition to recovering debris, investigators are interviewing crew members who were on the Polar Prince, the support ship that was used for the dive. Those witnesses are being interviewed in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Neubauer declined to give a timeline for the investigation.

After the evidence is collected, the case would be reviewed during public hearings, and a final report would be delivered to the commandant of the Coast Guard, Neubauer said. That report would include the investigators’ findings, as well as recommendations for further civil and criminal action as well as for regulatory changes “to prevent a similar occurrence,” Neubauer said.

“Any subsequent enforcement activities would be pursued under a separate investigation,” he said.

No matter what the investigation finds, the Coast Guard will continue to provide search and rescue to those in trouble at sea at no charge to those rescued, Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger said.

“As a matter of U.S. law and Coast Guard policy, the Coast Guard doesn’t charge for search and rescue, nor do we associate a cost with human life,” he told reporters. “We always answer the call.”

Previously: Sub tragedy sets off a torrent of questions