WAR CAUSES SWIFT DECAY OF SCIENTIFIC TIES
PARIS — Without Russian help, climate scientists worry how they’ll keep up their important work of documenting warming in the Arctic. Europe’s space agency is wrestling with how its planned Mars rover might survive freezing nights on the Red Planet without its Russian heating unit.
And what of the world’s quest for carbon-free energy if 35 nations cooperating on an experimental fusion-power reactor in France can’t ship vital components from Russia?
In scientific fields with profound implications for mankind’s future and knowledge, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is causing a swift and broad decaying of relationships and projects that bound together Moscow and the West. PostCold War bridge-building through science is unraveling as Western nations seek to punish and isolate the Kremlin by drying up support for scientific programs involving Russia.
The costs of this decoupling, scientists say, could be high on both sides. Tackling climate change and other problems will be tougher without collaboration and time will be lost. Russian and Western scientists have become dependent on each other’s expertise as they have worked together on conundrums from unlocking the power of atoms to firing probes into space. Picking apart the dense web of relationships will be complicated.
The European Space Agency’s planned Mars rover with Russia is an example. Arrays of Russian sensors to sniff, scour and study the planet’s environment may have to be unbolted and replaced and a non-Russian launcher rocket found if the suspension of their collaboration becomes a lasting rupture. In that case, the launch, already scrubbed for this year, couldn’t happen before 2026.
“We need to untangle all this cooperation which we had, and this is a very complex process, a painful one I can also tell you,” the ESA director, Josef Aschbacher, said in an Associated Press interview. “Dependency on each other, of course, creates also stability and, to a certain extent, trust. And this is something that we will lose, and we have lost now, through the invasion of Russia in Ukraine.”
International indignation and sanctions on Russia are making formal collaborations difficult or impossible. Scientists who became friends are staying in touch informally but plugs are being pulled on their projects big and small. The European Union is freezing Russian entities out of its main 95 billion
“We need to untangle all this cooperation which we had, and this is a very complex process, a painful one I can also tell you.”
—Josef Aschbacher
euro ($105 billion) fund for research, suspending payments and saying they’ll get no new contracts. In Germany, Britain and elsewhere, funding and support is also being withdrawn for projects involving Russia.
In the United States, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology severed ties with a research university it helped establish in Moscow. The oldest and largest university in Estonia won’t accept new students from Russia and ally Belarus. The president of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Tarmo Soomere, says the breaking of scientific connections is necessary but also will hurt.
“We are in danger of losing much of the momentum that drives our world towards better solutions, (a) better future,” he told the AP. “Globally, we are in danger of losing the core point of science — which is obtaining new and essential information and communicating it to others.”
Russian scientists are bracing for painful isolation. An online petition by Russian scientists and scientific workers opposed to the war says it now has more than 8,000 signatories. They warn that by invading Ukraine, Russia has turned itself into a pariah state, which “means that we can’t normally do our work as scientists, because conducting research is impossible without full-fledged cooperation with foreign colleagues.”
The growing estrangement is being pushed by Russian authorities, too. An order from the Science Ministry suggested that scientists no longer need bother getting research published in scientific journals, saying they’ll no longer be used as benchmarks for the quality for their work.
Lev Zelenyi, a leading physicist at the Space Research Institute in Moscow who was involved in the now-suspended collaboration on the ExoMars rover, described the situation as “tragic” and said by email to the AP that he and other Russian scientists must now “learn how to live and work in this new non-enabling environment.”
On some major collaborations, the future isn’t clear. Work continues on the 35-nation ITER fusion-energy project in southern France, with Russia still among seven founders sharing costs and results from the experiment.
ITER spokesman Laban Coblentz said
patients with basic “yes” or “no” answers.
The results hold potential promise for patients in similarly unresponsive situations, including minimally conscious and comatose states, as well as the rising number of people diagnosed with ALS worldwide every year. That number is projected to reach 300,000 by 2040.
“It’s a game-changer,” said Steven Laureys, a neurologist and researcher who leads the Coma Science Group at the University of Liège in Belgium and was not involved in the study. The technology could have ethical ramifications in discussions surrounding physician-assisted suicide for patients in locked-in or vegetative states, he added; “it’s really great to see this moving forward, giving patients a voice” in their own decisions.
Myriad methods have been used to communicate with unresponsive patients. Some involve basic pen-and-paper methods devised by family relatives. In others, a caregiver points to or speaks the names of items and looks for microresponses — blinks, finger twitches from the patient.
In recent years, a new method has taken center stage: brain-computer interface technologies, which aim to translate a person’s brain signals into commands. Research institutes, private companies and entrepreneurial billionaires like Elon Musk have invested heavily in the technology.
The results have been mixed but compelling: patients moving prosthetic limbs using only their thoughts, and those with strokes, multiple sclerosis and other conditions communicating once again with loved ones.
What scientists have been unable to do until now, however, is communicate extensively with people like the man in the new study who displayed no movements whatsoever.
In 2017, before becoming totally locked-in, the patient had used eye movements to communicate with his family. Anticipating that he would soon lose even this ability, the family asked for an alternative communication system and approached Chaudhary and Birbaumer, a pioneer in the field of brain-computer interface technology, both of whom worked nearby.
With the man’s approval, Dr. Jens Lehmberg, a neurosurgeon and an author on the study, implanted two tiny electrodes in regions of the man’s brain that are involved in controlling movement. Then, for two months, the man was asked to imagine moving his hands, arms and tongue to see if these would generate a clear brain signal. But the effort yielded nothing reliable.
Birbaumer then suggested using auditory neurofeedback, an unusual technique by which patients are trained to actively manipulate their own brain activity. The man was first presented with a note — high or low, corresponding to yes or no. This was his “target tone” — the note he had to match.
He was then played a second note, which mapped onto brain activity that the implanted electrodes had detected. By concentrating — and imagining moving his eyes, to effectively dial his brain activity up or down — he was able to change the pitch of the second tone to match the first. As he did so, he gained real-time feedback of how the note changed, allowing him to heighten the pitch when he wanted to say yes or lower it for no.
This approach saw immediate results. On the man’s first day trying, he was able to alter the second tone. Twelve days later, he succeeded in matching the second to the first.
“That was when everything became consistent, and he could reproduce those patterns,” said Jonas Zimmermann, a neuroscientist at the Wyss Center and an author on the study. When the patient was asked what he was imagining to alter his own brain activity, he replied, “Eye movement.”
Over the next year, the man applied this skill to generate words and sentences. The scientists borrowed a communication strategy that the patient had used with his family when he could still move his eyes.
At this stage, the technology is far too complex for patients and families to operate. Making it more user-friendly and speeding up communication will be crucial, Chaudhary said.
“You have two options: no communication or communication at 1 character per minute,” he said. “What do you choose?”
Perhaps the biggest concern is time. Three years have passed since the implants were first inserted in the patient’s brain. Since then, his answers have become significantly slower, less reliable and often impossible to discern, said Zimmermann, who is now caring for the patient at the Wyss Center.
Zimmermann and others at the Wyss Center are developing wireless microelectrodes that are safer to use. “As much as we want to help people, I think it’s also very dangerous to create false hope,” Zimmermann said.