Scientists Reveal The Most Controversial Debates The Public Doesn’t Know About

These scientists tell all!

Smarty Pants

The development of a general Artificial Intelligence and solving the control problem associated with it. The debate isn’t if we will build an AI because it’s only a matter of time once you admit Intelligence is only a matter of information processing, but rather how to avoid letting it destroy us. You basically have to solve ethics, and then find a way to program that into the AI. Because say you have (and this is a common example) a stamp collecting AI that you give your credit card, and it goes on the internet buys stamps. Cool. Then it learns it can persuade others to just give you stamps feigning a stamp collecting museum. Then it realizes it can hack all printers connected to the web and print more stamps. Then it realizes stamps are made of paper which come from trees. Then it realizes humans are made of the same thing stamps are (Carbon and Oxygen essentially). So you get the point but this is simply a problem for an AI that has one specific job. Imagine the infinite problems a general AI would pose for us the second it doesn’t see preserving us is in its best interest. I personally have found this entire field extremely fascinating. Nick Bostrom has an amazing Ted Talk about it. (Source)

Logical Arguments

There’s a debate in my field over whether or not negative corpus is a bad thing. One side of the argument is that if you rule out all accidental causes then the only potential cause left is that someone set the fire. The other side is that that’s crap because you have no evidence that it was a set fire except for the lack of evidence to say it was accidental. I personally don’t like negative corpus. I’d prefer to have some form of evidence that the fire was set, i.e. A positive flammable liquid sample, witness statement, video evidence, confession, etc. Saying that somebody set the building on fire because we couldn’t find any evidence that it was accidental makes me feel uncomfortable and just seems like fucked up logic. (Source)

Baby, It’s Hot Out There

High-temperature superconductors. They were discovered in 1987, and the exact mechanism which allows superconductivity to such high temperatures is still pretty mysterious, not to mention some of the other weird phases in these materials unrelated to superconductivity. There are a lot of grudges, some between very famous physicists, over how to approach explaining them. (Source)

It’s My Body

With autologous stem cells (those obtained from and reintroduced into the same person), research scientists seem to tend to favor tight regulation of research to prevent harm to patients and quackery (high prices paid out-of-pocket and false promises based on no peer-reviewed research). Meanwhile, clinicians (doctors) seem to favor having the freedom to experiment with their patients, arguing that they don’t make promises, they’re seeing amazing results, the risks are very low, the costs are (often) fairly low, it’s the patient’s own cells, often there are no other options (or they’ve been exhausted), and that regulation would bring a halt to what they characterize as currently an explosion of innovation that has the potential to revolutionize medicine. (The determining factor here is whether the FDA will categorize one’s own stem cells as a drug or not.) I personally lean toward the clinicians/MDs’ point of view (though every party on each side does have serious financial self-interest, it must be said), though I completely respect the researchers’ point of view. I happen to be somewhat risk averse and I don’t mind taking a certain amount of financial and physical risk to experiment on myself with possible life-changing benefits, so long as I can give informed consent. That’s just me though; I accept that it leaves the door open to a lot of unethical behavior by unscrupulous practitioners who can prey on desperate people who won’t do any due diligence. (Source)

Monkey Business

Monkey scientist here. The prevalence of SRV in monkey colonies and it’s impact on research as a almost non- virulent strain. SRV has developed into a totally latent virus in many colonies, whereas it used to be deadly. This is the optimal evolutionary path for many viruses. Exist, but don’t do the host harm enough to kill it, so you get passed on. We’ve gotten to the point where there are many labs/colonies who don’t test for the latest strain because it has no visible/symptomatic effect on the animals. Why? Cause it costs money to test them, and every animal that has it might not be usable/wanted by researchers regardless of their knowledge of the disease. The problem is with certain projects that involve immune suppression/alteration. GVHD, HIV, TCAR, Stem cells. Sometimes with that, the virus can rear it’s ugly head and cause problems….sometimes, and it’s not throughly documented. In fact some labs have probably run SRV+ monkeys for decades unknowingly. Do labs waste the effort and extensive money clearing this possible unknown factor from their population, or continue knowing it’s an outlying factor (maybe)? EVERY primate center in America a different approach and attitude towards this. (Source)

Necessary Qualifications

Medical Laboratory Scientist here, there is a bill being passed to make a nursing degree equivalent to a bachelor’s degree in biological science meaning that, without additional schooling, nurses could potentially be entering hospital laboratories because of a lack of MLS and Medical Technicians/Technologists. Trust me on this, you want nurses by your bedside and not in charge of your lab results. Many people don’t know this, but part of my job every day is arguing with nurses over the validity of blood draws. They will do whatever they can to get me to release orders despite there being potential contamination or if it was a traumatic draw. They do not want to redraw you. We don’t want to redraw you either, but our job is to get accurate results to your doctor even if it means another poke in the arm. (Source)

It’s a Man’s World

Well, there is controversy over the fact that female animal models are not used for studies nearly as much as male animal models. This occurs even while studying female prevalent diseases like breast cancer. The NIH is pushing using females for studies recently, which is great. (Source)

Are We Compatible?

There are many such disagreements in the medical fields. One such disagreement (that I’ve seen first-hand) is in the field of organ transplants. The current standard is to find a matching donor, perform the transplant, then place the patient on anti-rejection therapy to help with recovery and maintain a healthy post-transplant life. There are many who believe we should instead spend more time and resources to develop more effective anti-rejection drugs that will allow a transplant recipient to receive organs from any healthy donor (within some basic compatibility threshold); bypassing the full genotypic compatibility tests. If such an initiative is successful then the problems of maintaining donor registries, full compatibility testing, and long transplant waitlist would be largely eliminated. (Source)

Computing the Cost of the Work Force

In computing: how fast computation is evolving. Many of us in the field believe we are doing a huge disservice to the populace, as we know we are putting millions out of jobs (and this number will only grow!). So many of us have mixed feelings about this. However, the consumers keep demanding more, and we keep trying to provide it. It’s a double edged sword really, but I think some highly respected scientists (such as Hawking) have put it best when they say we are heading towards inequality like we have never before seen. (Source)

Do We Need Another Test?

EM doc. I think one of the controversies in our field revolves around the idea of an acceptable miss rate for illnesses/injuries. There is a spectrum when ordering diagnostic tests. It goes from order all the tests on everybody and miss nothing to order very little and just diagnose based on history and physical. Obviously, practicing towards the former is expensive and leads to lots of false positives which lead to further, sometimes risky testing like cardiac catheterizations or large number of imaging studies with radiation. Practicing towards the later, of course, leads to missed diagnosis, sometimes with bad outcomes. There are some disease states where I think we’ve gone to far towards testing everyone without using sense. For example, low risk chest pain – in my observation unit false positive stress tests outnumber true positives. This means cardiac caths which have a nonzero risk of injury to vessels, bleeding, or kidney injury in a patient who really had almost no risk of active heart disease in the first place. But people get nervous about sending them home because if they have a heart attack any time in the next couple months you will get sued and maybe lose, even if their current presentation is from those weights they lifted the other day. There are all sorts of examples of similar processes where we feel obligated to order tests we are 99% sure will be negative. This is unlikely to be cost effective long term (Source)

Publish or Perish Leads to a Glut of Junk

For scientists in academia at least, there is an ongoing debate regarding what constitutes a “scientific contribution”. The publication process, combined with tenure requirements at many institutions, have led to low-impact, trivial research papers that cause many fields to stagnate. Many would argue that a lot of the research published today is insignificant in terms of advancing the field. (Source)

Is It Live or Is It Memorex?

Whether or not you can describe a new species just from photographs – not a physical specimen. Having a holotype (housed in a research collection) has pretty much always been the norm for a new species description, and there are many taxonomists who say that anything less for a species description is basically malpractice in this field. Others are saying with the increase in our technological ability, if there is no specimen, a photograph is better than nothing. Think of deep-sea submersibles taking video and photographs. (Source)

A Real Pain

ER doc here… Enormous debate rages on how to control pain without using addictive substances. This ranges from using lidocaine in new and creative ways, to implementing acupuncture and massage therapy more regularly in western medicine. At the end of the day, I (personally) think the problem isn’t how we treat pain, but how we can possibly prevent addiction… (Source)

Creating Pain

Does [insert organism] feel pain. Currently the organism that’s receiving the most attention is fish. The debate arises initially through our understanding of pain. Pain isn’t just the physical/physiological response to a painful stimulus leading to an organism moving away from that stimulus (this is termed nociception, and is very widely distributed through the animal kingdom). Pain is the additional emotional response – in mammals this emotional aspect is thought to derive from the neocortex, but this is a structure that is missing in non-mammalian animals. Thus, combined with a historic maltreatment of animals from the sea, fish without a neocortex are considered by many to be incapable of perceiving pain. However, what many researchers do not consider is the possibility of analogous structures which may accomplish the same functions as the neocortex in these animals. A whole suite of behavioural and neurophysiological studies have been performed in order to demonstrate whether or not fish feel pain. This is controversial for numerous reasons: the most obvious is that it has (or at least ought to have) massive implications for how we treat fish. That aside, studies into animal pain are by definition controversial since pain/nociception needs to be inflicted on an almost definitely unwilling animal to determine their responses. It would be nice if people would assume a worst case scenario (they do feel the emotional component of pain) before handling any animal but, sadly, this is not the case and thus it needs to be scientifically demonstrated. (Source)

It’s All in the Genes

Maybe a lot of people know about this already, but since no one has mentioned it yet, I’ll bite. For the past couple years, there has been a huge debate about who “owns” or who has “the rights” to the genome editing system, CRISPR/Cas9. For anyone who doesn’t know, simply put, CRISPR is a really powerful gene editing tool allowing us to basically cut and paste whatever we want wherever we want into DNA sequences. It’s THE BOMB for molecular biologists, and makes it pretty darn easy to manipulate DNA however you want. There are two groups fighting for “ownership” (I put it in quotes because it’s more like recognition and attribution) of the technique – one headed by Dr. Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley, and one headed by Feng Zhang at MIT. I’m not going to give my opinion on the matter, but definitely look it up if you’re into patents, science ethics, etc. Aside all of that, CRISPR is revolutionizing genetic engineering, so it’s pretty dope. I think whoever wins this debate has a shot at a Nobel Prize. It’s that important. 😀 (Source)