What I have to say here is that we don’t know enough about our consciousness, to unequivocally judge the possibility of robots consciousness. Nevertheless I still think robots lack a crucial ingredient of consciousness, which is self-consciousness. They lack it because robots are made for purpose, namely to serve us. Robots with real consciousness would place themselves in the centre of their mind and act on their own accords to maximize THEIR chance of survival. Of course it is not the scientists but the public who decide whether they want such “selfish” robots or not, and they must ask themselves whether it is morally consistent to build and accept new artificial conscious agents, in our society while rejecting potentially concious life being born from us, namely human.

This is not going to be easy, I felt, after reading an article on Times by Jeremy Clarkson from TopGear. He said:

”...So you might imagine that all of the world’s scientists are currently in their bunkers, desperately trying to figure out why the world is running out of food all of a sudden and, more importantly, what can be done.

And now, it seems, the world’s boffins have got more important things on their enormous minds. Last week, for instance, as the fires in Haiti burnt, a group of eggheads at Yale University announced that after some exhaustive research, they’d proved women who eat chocolate five times a week are 40% less likely to get preeclampsia than those who indulge only once a week. “

Of course everybody is like that. A few years ago BBC radio 4 broadcasted a programme called “WHAT REMAINS TO BE DISCOVERED?” and they discussed the problem of consciousness. One of the questions they considered I think particularly relevant to general public is: “Why do so many of us hope that we are more than simply wonderful machines? ”. Of course we don’t think of it everyday, but this question pops up every now and then in different forms.

The debate on abortion is one such thing. We know that embryos are alive however young they are, but some claim that terminating them is ethical as long as it is before they become conscious. Then this argument would lead us to a tricky question: Is it unethical to kill animals which are conscious? If so, where would we set the boundary between “conscious” or “unconscious”? I do not believe that such boundary actually exists and I am trying to prove that by demonstrating the possibility of consciousness in cells.

I would appreciate your valuable opinions on this, and I will incorporate them in my presentation whenever possible. Many thanks in advance.

It is an old book (published in 1985) and the way Virgil created the intelligent cells did not sound very convincing to me, but it has been an interesting read so far. In this book, the author sort of defines cell consciousness in bacteria: ”...the cells developed their own memory and the ability to process and act upon environmental information”. In the end, Virgil manages to train lymphocytes to ”interact as much as possible with each other and with their environment – a much more complex miniature glass maze”

I don’t think lymphocytes would ever learn how to navigate themselves through a maze, but I agree with the idea that conscious cellular matter should be able to perceive and interpret external environmental information and respond to it. It will also need a memory storage, because otherwise all it can do will be reflex.

Later in the book Virgil’s mother asks him a question: ”Are they friendly?...If they can think, then they feel something…”. Umm, good question. I will answer that next time.

Anil Seth has a presentation entitled “Measuring Consciousness”. In the abstract he stated “Presently, behavioral and brain-based measures tend to pick up on different aspects of consciousness: Brain-based measures are especially suited for measuring conscious level, whereas behavioral measures are mostly used for assessing which contents are conscious. Therefore, an integrative approach combining in single studies both types of measures encourages a virtuous circularity in which putative measures and theoretical advances mutually inform, validate, and refine one another”

This is a fair point and certainly applicable to cell consciousness too. Namely measuring intracellular molecules, such as calcium or ATP, can tell the level of cellular activity, but not useful to predict cellular behaviours. On the other hand, watching cell morphology or migration can directly indicate cellular behaviours.

In another abstract, Kinouchi et al proposed “A Model of Consciousness and Self Based on Simple Abstracted Brain-Like Neural Network System”. This is a version of Global Workplace Theory, but emphasize self-recursive perception. Namely the system observe its own emotion and it will avoid “unpleasant” experience and continue “pleasant” experience. As for cells, they do know what is stressful and respond to it, but I am not sure if cells can feel pleasure. It is worth thinking of.

At the end of the day, I am still not sure if I should go to the meeting or not. I would appreciate if you could give me more time and of course any suggestions are most welcome!

Although I understand why HEFCE is proposing, I am extremely concerned that a young PI like me would suffer significantly in the next RAE. It will take five to ten years to access the citation impact of each article and I have few publications which would date back that far. Also I feel pressure that I have to publish articles which are likely to be cited quickly. Such articles are perhaps co-authored by well-known senior researchers and in pace with current trends of the field, while my desire is to cultivate a new field of research from scratch without influence from seniors. Maybe I am a bit naïve and over-ambitious but I am feeling that artificial metrics like this is going to suffocate my research.

When I discuss this issue with others, I often struggle to explain what is the “right” wage for a profession. Perhaps everybody (except for doctors) would be happy if they get paid the national average, but then the public will have no right to complain if the doctors refuse to work more than the national average. Considering the number of doctors and hospitals in Japan, the healthcare system will collapse if doctors work only 40 hrs a week.

The problem, perhaps, is that it is unclear who should determine the salary for doctors. One argument would be it should be the public whose money funds the healthcare. So maybe Japanese should have a referendum to determine the salary. If that is so, however, salaries for other public sectors, even Prime Minister’s, should be voted by the public. I know it is not going to happen soon, but at least I can try it on the web…

Although I have read some of his books previously, I never learned a really useful lesson from them. It is difficult for me to take them seriously because I have been told that he often makes stories up. Moreover, his advice in the books, such as “take risks”, is mostly shallow and only reasonably meaningful because it was said by a very famous scientist.

Then, now his racial outburst. It was not surprising to me since he said something like that before. However, this scandal reminds me of a lesson, which is perhaps more important than anything else he says in the new book. Scientific research is funded by public who believe one day it will transform their life. Therefore scientists particularly if they are well known, have intellectual responsibility to hold up the right scientific attitude which is firmly based on evidence rather than prejudice or guess. Since he is suspended by CSHL, Dr. Watson can perhaps set up a research institute which is fully funded by his own earning so that he can learn how much he owe his success to the support from public who he has just offended in the most revolting manner.

I was pleased to know that one of the prize winner was Japanese, and Japanese newspapers gave fair amount of coverage to it. Let me quote a passage from Science.

“Ice cream may never be the same now that Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan has discovered how to extract vanillin, the essence of vanilla flavor, from cow dung. Don’t pooh-pooh Yamamoto’s accomplishment. It may not win her a Nobel Prize, but it has netted her an honor equally exclusive. “

According to a Japanese newspaper, such technology is possible because vanilla is extracted from plants which cows eat. Although she admits that vanilla extracted from her method may not be suitable for ice cream, it can be an inspiration for chemists who are working on renewable resources.

On the other hand, students from some other countries in the centre did not seem to be against using speaking their native languages even when there were people who did not speak them. I was OK with that, but later I was told that some of them were actually openly abusing me everytime when I was having breakfast with them in our student accomodation. Although it was quite shocking, I let them carry on because if they didn’t do so in front of me, they would still have done that elsewhere.

Several years passed and now I live in Cambridge, which has a large population of Japanese researchers. I normally talk to them in Japanese when we go out together, but I do speak in English when non-Japanese speakers are coming with us. Nevertheless, some locals don’t like that and occationally they verbally (or even physically) attack us saying things like “speak English!”.

Experiences like these make me think if I should have a certain rule on how we use our native languages in my lab. In her book “At The Helm”, Kathy Barker suggests lab members should only use English in the lab and perhaps many people agree with her. However, it would be quite unrealistic to do so if you have a lab which is located in Japan and has, say, 8 Japanese and 3 British. Besides, using the same language does not necessarily help because those with poorer English proficiency can easily be left out of conversation. My feeling is that we should respect the fact that people from different countries have communication barriers which cannot be overcome by simply speaking the same language. Breaking such barrieres will probably need conscious efforts from lab members as well as from the P.I..I would appreciate comments from anyone who are conducting such efforts, but in the meantime, I shall stick to, eh, Japanese in my Japanese-only lab…

Therefore, it should be reasonably straightforward to organise collaborative activities between experimental and theoretical neuroscientists and set up databases and computational tools for sharing and disseminating experimental data. Didn’t look like that, I am afraid, from what I have heard from this workshop. In bioinformatics there have been the data, such as genome sequence, protein structure, or microarray data which nearly everybody thinks are important and clearly require informatics for efficient analysis. I am not sure if we can agree on that for neuroscientific data. In molecular biology, there is the central dogma and since it was proposed by Crick most of the molecular biological research haｓ been focused around it. In neuroscience, on the other hand, it is very difficult to come up with a similar dogma because cognition cannot be described as a linear process. As a result neuroinformatics tends to be very diverse and diffused without a clear focus and if it continues, little will come out from large collaborative research which needs a well-defined direction.

I am not really qualified to suggest what should be the central topic of neroinformatics, but at least I can suggest something simpler. If you search the word “neuroinformatics” by Google, you will find a lot of databases, software and other research activities related to it. Funnily enough though, there seem to be little connections between them despite the popular mantra that neuroinformatics is about connecting data and people with different backgrounds together. Perhaps it would be useful if we can have a unified portal site from which neuroscientists can find data they need as well as right research groups who share common or complementary interest. Maybe I should set up the site. Is there anyone who wants to collaborate with me?

So, to regain my confidence in my work, I wanted to know what really prominent biologists said on theoretical biology . The strongest words came from, you guessed it, Francis Crick. It was a bit suprising to me that the person who is known as the best theoreticao biologist of our time had quite harsh comments on the abuse of theory in biology, but I thought he was quite right. Here are some quotes:

“The job of theorists, especially in biology, is to suggest new experiments.”

“Elegance and a deep simplicity, often expressed in an abstract mathematical form, are useful guides in physics, but in biology such intellectual tools can be very misleading. For this reason a theorist in biology has to receive much more guidance from the experimental evidence….”

“It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot”

Looking back, I was quite naive and amaturish as a theoretical biologist when I was younger. I just loved my theory too much that it was impossible for me to believe that it could be wrong. Nowadays I spend a lot of time in scientific conferences to tell theoretical biologists that their theories will have no impact on biology without sound experimental backups. I wish there were more biologists who can give more direct feedbacks to theorists, but most of them are too busy with their experiments to do so. Recently we have seen a rise of web-based communities for scientific discussions, including Nature Precedings. I do hope such media will be utilised for better debates between theoretical and experimental biologists on mathematical and computational models for biology.

The trouble is that the labs from which these stories came are actually doing very well scientifically. Therefore it is easy for the lab heads to say “well, you know, working as a scientist is tough. I am famous and have lots of money for my lab because I work hard. You won’t get a tenure or a grant if you don’t work more than others.”. The argument that people can work more effectively with shorter working time won’t be taken seriously unless significant number of really prominent scientists agree with it.

Of course there are some great scientists which had a better balance between work and private life. Another Japanese Nobel prize winner Shirakawa used to go home about 6PM and stayed at home during weekends, growing his cactus. Another winner Tanaka also said that he preferred not to work too long to maximize his productivity.

I understand such generalization is dangerous, but my impression is that those who regard science as a sort of competitive game tend to work longer and require others to do the same, while those who see it as a life style are more willing to balance it with other aspects of their life. I think I am a bit of both, but I would like my lab to be somewhere the scientists of both styles can work happily together.

Kojiro

Now I am in a position of setting up a policy for those who are going to work in my lab, since many of the funding bodies who support my students/postdocs don’t necessarily have detailed terms on how they should work. I want the policy to be transparent and fair for me and them, so I decided to set explicit working hours for them. In Japan I have heard someone saying that lab members should come to work before their supervisor and go home after him/her. OK then, let’s say they should work from 8AM to 9PM, seven day a week, namely 91 hours a week.

However, is it fair to set such working hours? Or is it even legal? In UK legal working time is 48 hours, and there is a loop hole. The working hours do not include unpaid overtime where you volunteer to do so, for example, staying late to finish something off. (see http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHoursAndTimeOff/DG_10029426). In other words, I can keep my lab members longer at work if I give them plenty of things to do and they “volunteer” to continue them after working hours. As for paid annual leave, all workers will have 4.8 weeks (24 days) per year from October. The caveat is that I can set when they should take holidays, so it is possible to set holidays when they are very busy, so that they would come to work anyway even during holiday in order to continue their experiments.

Of course I am not being serious, but this illustrates how vulnerable the lab workers can be even within the limit of law and I am aware that not all PIs are law-abiding when it comes to working time. In my personal view, research should be self-motivated and there is little point in setting working time, though I will probably use the 48 hours limit as guidance when I decide on how much tasks I allocate to lab members each week. Is this fair or not? I would appreciate your opinions.

First of all, the definition of “alternative medicine” is quite unclear. According to a medical dictionary, it is “any of various systems of healing or treating disease (as chiropractic, homeopathy, or faith healing) not included in the traditional medical curricula taught in the United States and Britain”. If this is what he meant, anything which is taught in medical schools in Japan, for example, but not in USA or UK would be called alternative medicine. OK, that definition may not be so good, so how about “medicine whose effect has not been proved by science”. Sounds better? Then you must accept that Western medicine is also a form of alternative medicine, because not every aspect of its practice has been proved effective by clinical trials.

Even though it is strongly supported by science, Western medicine is still highly empirical and will continue to be that way. That is because the progress of medical science is far too slow for patients and they don’t want to be stopped from receiving would-be live-saving treatment just because there is no paper to support it. Moreover, , too much emphasis on scientific evidence often downplay the fact that medicine is highly personal and individual and it is extremely difficult to reflect that in and clinical trials.

Of course there must be some form of regulation in any kind of medical practice. In Japan only doctors with so-called Western medical license can practice alternative medicine, though many of herbal remedies are also available from pharmacists. Medical practice must be honest, transparent and ready to take criticism. If proved to be harmful it should be stopped, or limited to licensed practitioners if there is a hint of evidence that it can be useful for some patients.

I think this is getting too long. I will continue this discussion another time.

Kojiro

As Farhat pointed out, it seems to be rather unusual for a medical doctor to become a computational biologist. Most of the computational biology courses when I was younger wanted someone with experience in lab, programming or mathematics, rather than in clinic. So I taught myself scientific programming, data analysis and mathematics. To be honest I am still not so sure if I am a proper compuational biologist.

Timo, thanks for your information on Nature Asia-Pacific Forum. I listened to the podcast which included talks by Noyori and Liu. They discussed several issues but essentially all is about how to do science like West. In my opinion there are a few key elements for this:

1) A common language. It should be a native language within the asia-pacific region. A natural choice would be Chinese.

2) Social stability. Scientists should be able to work without fear of intimidation because of their religion, nationality or political opinion.

3) Autonomy. Governments in Asia-pacific regions have too much control over university and science policy. They should delegate the power to scientist-run organizations.

I wouldn’t expect any of these will materialise in the next few decades but I believe they are absolutely necessary for real science to flourish.

That’s it for today. Have a good weekend.

Kojiro

So, today I was thinking of where I can find a permanent research position in the future.

I started a job search in JREC-IN, a search engine for jobs in Japanese universities. The keyword “Computational Biology” gave no result. “Information and Biololgy” gave several results, but most of them weren’t really for me.

But there was one, looking for a “life science informatics” scientist. Hmm, looking all right. Then there was another one, looking for someone who worked in “an interdisciplinary field between informatics and biomedicine”.I thought, well, I could fit myself in.

Now ads from jobs.ac.uk, a UK job site. The same keyword “computational biology”, gave no result again. “bioinformatics” gave a few results. One was looking for someone interested in “statistical analysis of very large genetics”. Not for me, really. Another wanted a medical bioinformatician, which I was not.

From these results, there may be more opportunities available in Japan if you can forget about the statistical significance of my result. Going back to the Japanese ads, however, I began to think, “what are they really looking for?” There must be thousands of scientists in Japan who are working on “life science informatics” kind of stuff and what they do would vary considerably. Maybe the advertisers did not know exactly who they want, and decided to put generic adverts and then see who might turn up.

As for UK ads, I was disappointed, to be honest, that none showed interest in my kind of research but at least it was clear to me what they wanted. They sort of helped me to think of what they were expecting from computational biology and bioinformatics.

So what do I do now? I have four more years to go with my current contract and I don’t think none of the jobs on offer was attractive enough to me. So I will stay and perhaps find someone who might want to work with me to get my project going. I am going put adverts for undergraduate students who are doing their final year projects. I might as well put two adverts, one with genetic description and one with more specifics. See which would fish better students….

Kojiro

I am setting up a blog where I can write on how scientists with different ethnic, cultural and educational backgrounds interact. I would like think I am in a good position to do so because

1) I am Japanese but working in Cambridge (UK),
2) I am a medical doctor but working at Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
3) I am an academic but work with private companies.

To spice up my blog, I may also write on not-so-academic topics and I hope you tolerate them as long as they are fun to read!

Kojiro