Features

A new lozenge containing the amino acid L-cysteine is an effective, nontoxic smoking-cessation product, according to researchers in Finland. 

At least two US experts are not convinced, however. 

The study was conducted by Dr Kari Syrjanen who, along with five coauthors, works in Helsinki for Biohit Oyj, the company that funded the study and markets the lozenge as Acetium. 

L-cysteine is an amino acid that eliminates acetaldehyde, a compound in cigarettes believed to play a role in tobacco addiction by enhancing the brain’s responses to nicotine. 

The research team recruited close to 2,000 cigarette smokers online and randomly assigned about half to use the L-cysteine lozenge with every single cigarette they smoked for six months, and the other half to use a dummy lozenge. 

All participants kept an electronic diary, recording the number of cigarettes smoked and how much they enjoyed smoking each one. 

Altogether, 753 people followed the directions for the entire study, and another 944 followed the directions most of the time, according to the report in Anticancer Research. 

Over six months, 331 people who finished the whole study quit smoking: 181 (18.2 per cent) who took the L-cysteine lozenge and 150 (15 per cent) who took the placebo. 

Among those who adhered strictly to the directions, 170 (45.3 per cent) who took the L-cysteine lozenge quit smoking compared with 134 (35.4 per cent) who took the placebo. 

Less smoking pleasure and “smoking sensations changed” were given as strong reasons for quitting. Six per cent of participants in the study reported adverse events (although the researchers did not collect the details), and the rate was about the same in both groups. 

Dr Scott Sherman, codirector of the Section on Tobacco, Alcohol and Drug Use at NYU Langone Medical Centre in New York called the study “promising” but said the lozenge “is not ready for prime time”.

The results are “modest”, he told Reuters Health by e-mail. The researchers did not compare the lozenge to other smoking-cessation treatments, he noted, and it is not clear if it would have worked as well if participants were not required to complete the daily diary. 

The lozenge is not available in the US, and other formulations of L-cysteine might not work as well as the one that was tested, Sherman noted. “If the manufacturer wanted to sell the product in the US and claim that it helps with quitting smoking, it would need to be approved and regulated by the Food and Drug Administration,” he said. 

Most successful smoking-cessation interventions also include behaviour counselling, she added. “If you have somebody you’re accountable to, it makes you feel better.” 

Fully computerised unmanned vehicles are around the corner. On the ground or in the air, we will soon be carried by such cars or aircrafts. Will you go for it, will you trust them with your life?

Fail-Safe is a fiction written by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler that dates back to 1964 and that tells of a narrowly avoided all-out nuclear war between the USA and what was then the Soviet Union. The false alarm was triggered because of an electrical malfunction in a control device circuit on the American side.

Although that was well before the digital and high-tech era, I still recall most of the details of the book that I read when it was released and I was in my early teens, and I cannot help now but linking it to what we are living today with global networks and our heavy, steadily growing dependence on computer systems in most everything we do or go through.

Digital systems errors happen every day and will continue to happen. You can always come up with explanations, that it is “nothing but” a programming error, that it is an electrical malfunction, a severe snowstorm that has torn the fibre optic cable, that hackers, terrorists, rogue IT geniuses and bad guys of all kinds took control and caused the problem. What counts is the result: a catastrophe has taken place, with various levels of damage, regardless of how it happened or who did it.

Missing a train because of a computer’s fault is one thing and losing your life in a train accident because of such a fault is another. Last week a major technical failure at the Montparnasse train station in Paris, France, severely disturbed the already congested summer holiday railway traffic for three consecutive days. No one was hurt except perhaps emotionally.

We have learnt to live with the hazards and the imperfection of digital technology, from wrong bank statements to smartphone malfunction, virus attacks, lost files, broken wireless connectivity, and everything in between. However, when it is your very life that is directly at stake, like in driverless cars or pilotless airplanes, one has the right to stop and think twice. For the consequence of technical failures in such cases is a terminal, irreversible damage.

There are those who are in favour of unmanned vehicles, who are strongly inclined to trust them, who cannot wait to see them in action on the streets and in the air. I am one of them.

Given that nothing is 100 per cent guaranteed and that no one, no system and no device will ever provide such absolute level of safety, unmanned vehicles will probably be safer in the end than manned ones, all things considered.

At least I can be sure that if I ever ride a driverless car it will never be writing and sending a WhatsApp text message while in the middle of the 5th Circle in Jabal Amman at rush hour. I have seen this all too often.

Those against will remind you that last month a man was killed in the USA in a Tesla self-driving car that was being tested. Of course these unfortunate accidents are bound to happen. But again, the question should not be “are self-driving vehicles absolutely safe?” but “are not self-driving vehicles safer than manned ones?”

Which is not to say that the question is to be taken lightly. There are definitely things to do to make self-driving and self-flying machines as close as possible to being 100 per cent safe.

Development, testing, programming, manufacturing and all phases and aspects of this amazing technology that today is brewing under our very eyes, they can be carried out with increased thoroughness, with utmost care and rigour, with a level of accuracy and quality that should exceed anything done before.

I believe that those doing it, whether Tesla, Google or other parties involved in such research, are doing it right and are perfectly aware of the dire consequences that a less-than-perfect job could lead to. They are smart enough and know what is at stake here.

People whose blood pressure varies widely from day to day may be more likely to develop dementia than adults who have fairly steady blood pressure, a Japanese study suggests. 

Researchers examined data from one month of daily home blood pressure readings for 1,674 older adults without dementia. During the next five years, compared to individuals with little to no fluctuation, people with the most variations in blood pressure were more than twice as likely to develop dementia. 

“The present study demonstrated that an increased day-to-day blood pressure variation (measured at home) was significantly associated with the development of all-cause dementia, vascular dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease, regardless of average home blood pressure,” said lead study author Dr Tomoyuki Ohara, of the Graduate School of Medical Sciences at Kyushu University in Fukuoka City. 

While the study didn’t assess why this might be the case, it is possible that daily variation in blood pressure might cause changes in the brain’s structure and function that contribute to the development of dementia, Ohara said by e-mail. 

Consistently high blood pressure, or hypertension, is a known risk factor for dementia. Previous research has also shown a link between cognitive impairment and dementia and different blood pressure readings at the doctor’s office. 

Home monitoring might give a more reliable snapshot of blood pressure than tests at the doctor’s office because stress or anxiety about these exams sometimes leads patients to have higher blood pressure at the office than they do at home, a so-called “white coat” effect. 

Participants in the current study were 71 years old on average. For one month, they typically measured their blood pressure three times each morning before eating breakfast or taking medication. About 43 per cent of them took drugs to manage high blood pressure. 

Researchers reviewed data from blood pressure readings taken during that month, conducted cognitive testing to uncover the development of dementia, and reviewed medical records for the occurrence of stroke. 

Five years later, 134 participants had developed Alzheimer’s disease and 47 had developed what’s known as vascular dementia, which results from diminished blood flow to the brain and is often related to the occurrence of small strokes. 

People with the most variation in daily blood pressure readings at the start of the study were more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and almost three times more likely to develop vascular dementia, researchers report in Circulation. 

Among participants with the most variability in blood pressure, higher systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure reading) in particular increased the risk of vascular dementia but did not appear to heighten the odds of Alzheimer’s disease. Systolic pressure is the pressure blood exerts against artery walls when the heart beats. 

One limitation of the study is that researchers lacked data on changes in blood pressure after the initial home monitoring period and did not have information on any lifestyle changes or medications people may have used to control blood pressure during the five-year follow-up period, the authors note. 

It’s also possible that fluctuations in blood pressure could be a symptom of cognitive decline in progress rather than a risk factor for developing dementia in the future, Dr Costantino Iadecola, director of the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York writes in an accompanying editorial. 

Iadecola noted that, presently, doctors do not know how to reduce variability in blood pressure. 

“The key question to be answered is whether interventions to control blood pressure variation, once available, would reduce dementia risk,” he said by e-mail. 

“In the meantime, the take-home message is that the health of the cardiovascular system is of paramount importance to the health of the brain,” Iadecola added. “Even if specific measures to target blood pressure variation may not be available at this time, maintaining general cardiovascular health through lifestyle changes (diet, exercise, etc.) and control of risk factors (diabetes, hypertension, smoking, obesity, etc.) remain the most sensible approaches to stave off dementia.”

The whole of last week I was as close to divinity as I can possibly hope to get in this life. Let me explain: a few days ago, as I stepped out of my room one fine morning, I saw a crowd of security guards lining the corridors of the hotel I was staying in. They tried to be discrete, but armed with guns and fancy earpieces — into which they whispered coded commands — it was obvious that they were protecting a very important individual.

My urgent need was to make it to the breakfast lounge on time, because if I lingered, I would have had to go without my first meal of the day. Once the hunger pangs were satiated, I did some detective work to uncover the identity of the hush-hush distinguished guest. What I discovered, took my breath away, because without any effort on my part, I found that His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was staying in a suite of rooms next to mine, on the same floor. I must emphasise that once more, on the same floor!

Which meant that, for the duration of his stay, among other things, I was breathing the same air as him, drinking from identical bottles of mineral water that the housekeeping provided us with, going up and down in the same elevators and looking out of our respective windows into the same cityscape. The enormity of the situation overwhelmed me so much that even without meeting him I felt as if I had been swept into his universe.

It is not that I am completely unfamiliar with Buddhism, the nuns in my convent school made sure we imbibed the fundamental teachings of all religions. And I had heard the Dalai Lama speak on different subjects at various literary festivals, in the last decade or so, but it was only after he became my temporary neighbour, that I started reading up about him in greater detail. The more I read of his life and work, the more fascinated I became with the compassionate soul, who was a living example of modern spirituality.

Soon, I wanted to meet him but other than joining the cordon of security personnel guarding him, like my husband suggested I do, there was no way I could manage it. I was informed that he was not well so every time His Holiness coughed, I could hear him through the partition wall that separated our rooms but because of his ill health I did not wish to disturb him while he was resting. I was promised an interview as soon as he felt better.

Due to security reasons, I was told by his associates to not mention the time and venue to anybody. Therefore for five days I kept the secret, and just when I felt my stomach would burst if I did not share it with someone, I was granted a small audience with him.

My feet turned cold immediately in nervousness but before I knew it, I was in his divine presence.

“Good morning, where have you come from?” His Holiness greeted me.

“I live in Jordan,” I replied, from force of habit. 

“Jordan!” he exclaimed, holding both my hands in a warm clasp. 

“I have been there. I loved the place,” he continued. 

“Do you like that country?” he quizzed.

“Yes,” I answered. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Being interviewed by His Holiness,” said the voice in my head.

FUJISAWA, Japan — When 82-year-old Masako Wakamiya first began working she still used an abacus for maths — today she is one of the world’s oldest iPhone app developers, a trailblazer in making smartphones accessible for the elderly.

Frustrated by the lack of interest from the tech industry in engaging older people, she taught herself to code and set about doing it herself. 

The over 60s, she insists, need to actively search out new skills to stay nimble.

“As you age, you lose many things: your husband, your job, your hair, your eyesight. The minuses are quite numerous. But when you learn something new, whether it be programming or the piano, it is a plus, it’s motivating,” she says.

“Once you’ve achieved your professional life, you should return to school. In the era of the Internet, if you stop learning, it has consequences for your daily life,” Wakamiya explains during an AFP interview at her home near Tokyo. 

She became interested in computers in the 1990s when she retired from her job as a bank clerk. It took her months to set up her first system, beginning with BBS messaging, a precursor to the Internet, before building her skills on a Microsoft PC, and then Apple’s Mac and iPhones. 

She asked software developers to come up with more for the elderly, but a repeated lack of response led her to take matters into her own hands.

Wakamiya learned the basics of coding and developed “Hinadan” one of Japan’s first dedicated app games for the over-60s — she is now in such demand that this year Apple invited her to participate at their prestigious Worldwide Developers Conference, where she was the oldest app creator to take part.

“Hinadan” — “the doll staircase” — was inspired by the Hina Matsuri, a doll festival which takes place every March, where ornamental dolls representing the emperor, his family and their guests are displayed in a specific arrangement.

In Wakamiya’s app, users have to put them in the correct positions — a task which is harder than it sounds, requiring memorisation of the complex arrangements.

The app, which is currently only available in Japanese, has been downloaded 42,000 times with hundreds of positive comments from users. 

And while these figures are relatively small compared to Japan’s big-hitting apps which are downloaded in their millions, “Hinadan” has proved popular enough that Wakamiya plans to release English, Chinese and possibly French versions of the app before next year’s festival.

Its success has propelled her on to the tech world stage, despite the industry’s reputation for being notoriously ageist

In Silicon Valley, workers in their 40s are considered old by some firms and according to media reports citing research firm Payscale, the median age for an employee at Facebook is 29 and at Apple is 31.

But international tech firms and start-ups are slowly waking up to the economic potential of providing for silver surfers, and Wakamiya has already met with Apple’s Chief Executive Tim Cook.

Wakamiya recalls: “He asked me what I had done to make sure that older people could use the app. I explained that I’d thought about this in my programming — recognising that older people lose their hearing and eyesight, and their fingers might not work so well.”

“Mr Cook complimented me,” she says proudly, adding that he had hailed her as a “source of inspiration”.

No time for sickness

Wakamiya concedes that she finds “writing lines of code is difficult” but has a voracious appetite to learn more.

“I want to really understand the fundamentals of programming, because at the moment I only learned the elements necessary for creating Hinadan,” she explains.

More than a quarter of Japan’s population is aged 65 and above, and this is projected to rise to 40 per cent by 2055. The government is struggling to ensure its population remains active and healthy — and so also see the dynamic octogenarian as an inspiration.

Wakamiya says her ultimate goal is to come up with “other apps that can entertain older people and help transmit to young people the culture and traditions we old people possess”.

“Most old people have abandoned the idea of learning, but the fact that some are starting [again] is not only good for them but for the country’s economy,” said Wakamiya, who took up the piano at 75.

Hinting that her good health is down to an active mind and busy life, she adds: “I am so busy everyday that I have no time to look for diseases.”

People who eat a lot of saturated fat — the “bad” kind of fat that is abundant in foods like butter and beef — are more likely to develop lung cancer than individuals on low-fat diets, a recent study suggests. 

Compared to adults who did not get a lot of fat in their diets, people who ate the most total fat and saturated fat were 14 per cent more likely to get lung malignancies, the study found. For current and former smokers, the added risk of a high fat diet was 15 per cent. 

While the best way to lower the risk of lung cancer is to not smoke, “a healthy diet may also help reduce lung cancer risk”, said study coauthor Danxia Yu of Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in Nashville, Tennessee. 

“Specifically, our findings suggest that increasing polyunsaturated fat intake while reducing saturated fat intake, especially among smokers and recent quitters, may [help prevent] not only cardiovascular disease, but also lung cancer,” she said. 

The American Heart Association recommends the Dietary Approaches To Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet or a Mediterranean-style diet to help prevent cardiovascular disease. Both diets emphasise cooking with vegetable oils with unsaturated fats, eating nuts, fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy products, whole grains, fish and poultry, and limiting red meat and added sugars and salt. 

“Those guidelines are the same for avoiding heart disease, stroke and diabetes, and I would say they are also exactly the same for helping with cancer prevention in general and lung cancer in particular,” said Dr Nathan Berger, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Centre who was not involved in the study. 

“This doesn’t mean you need to throw away all the steak and butter in your freezer, but cutting back to once a week would be good for you,” Berger said in a phone interview. 

For the current study, researchers examined data from 10 previously published studies in the United States, Europe and Asia that looked at how dietary fat intake influences the odds of lung malignancies. 

Combined, the smaller studies had more than 1.4 million participants, including 18,822 with cases of lung cancer identified during an average follow-up of more than nine years. 

Researchers sorted participants into five categories, from lowest to highest consumption of total and saturated fats. They also sorted participants into five groups ranging from the lowest to highest amounts of dietary unsaturated fats. 

Overall, people who ate the most unsaturated fats were 8 per cent less likely to develop lung cancer than people who ate the least amounts, researchers report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. 

Substituting 5 per cent of calories from saturated fat with unsaturated fat was associated with a 16 per cent lower risk of small cell lung cancer and 17 per cent lower odds of another type of lung malignancy known as squamous cell carcinoma. 

One limitation of the study is that dietary information was only obtained at one point, the authors note. This makes it impossible to track how changes in eating habits might influence the odds of cancer. 

They also did not account for two other things that may contribute to cancer — sugar and trans fats, Glen Lawrence, a biochemistry researcher at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York, said by email. Previous research has also found that unsaturated oils may increase the risk of certain cancers, added Lawrence, who wasn’t involved in the current study. 

It is also possible that other bad eating habits, not fat, contribute to the increased risk of lung cancer, said Ursula Schwab of the Institute of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition at the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio. 

“We need antioxidants, vitamins and minerals as well as unsaturated fatty acids,” Schwab, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by e-mail. “A typical Western diet has a low content of these essential nutrients and a high content of saturated fat.” 

Peugeot’s answer to the Volkswagen Golf, Ford Focus and other C-segment family hatchbacks, the 308 is a handsomely elegant offering with an up-market air, somewhat quirky driving position and a nice compromise between smooth ride and sharp handling. 

Driven in turbocharged THP165 guise with Allure specification the 308 boasts sprightly and confident near hot hatch performance but with a more subtle appearance rather than the boy racer attitude or go-faster styling. Instead, the Allure has an elegant and somewhat understated appeal with a sense of premium-ness about it.

Subtly assertive

Reconciling the elegant with the sporty, the Peugeot 308 Allure’s design features an uncomplicated yet athletic shape with subtly bulging convex and concave surfacing, strong waistline ridge running from bonnet to rear lights, and muscularly broad rear haunches.

With sculpted bonnet with the Peugeot lion emblem sitting in a concave groove, the 308 also features a classy yet understated two-slat trapezoidal chrome grille and smoothly flowing silhouette. Its lights, however, feature a more assertive design with lion motifs, including a sharp lower indentation in front and claw-like at the rear. 

Smooth and understated compared to sportier versions of the 308, the Allure driven Allure specification demo car did, however, feature wide and low profile 225/45R17 tyres, which provided a good balance between grip, feel and comfort. The driven model additionally featured auto-swivelling headlights and LED running lights which trail off to the cars side character line. 

Meanwhile, a panoramic sunroof and light interior and leather upholstery colours lent the 308 and airy and light cabin ambiance, contrasted with dark exterior tones and tinted windows, which lent a more conservative flavour to its taut sense of momentum.

Confident and comfortable

Powered by more garden-variety THP165 version of the same joint Peugeot and BMW developed direct injection turbocharged 1.6-litre engine that also powers 177BHP and 202BHP GT and 246BHP and 266BHP GTI incarnations of the 308, the non-hot hatch Allure delivers perky and confident performance and frugal fuel efficiency. Developing 163BHP at 5500rpm and 177lb/ft torque from just 1400rpm, the 308 THP165 is responsive off the line, with little turbo lag. Driving the front wheels through a 6-speed automatic gearbox, the THP165 dispatches the 0-100km/h dash in under 8.5-seconds and can attain in excess of 200km/h.

Subtly muscular yet eager to rev right to its redline, the 308 THP165 riding a plentiful wave of mid-range torque as revs rise, power accumulates and pace picks up neatly. Whether powering through corners and inclines or cruising and overtaking on motorways and in town with flexible confidence and versatility, the THP165’s is most comfortable in its broad and muscular mid-range sweet spot. 

Gear shifts are well-compromised between smoothness and speed, and one has to pull back rather than push the gear lever forward for manual “tiptronic” mode shifts, as one does in a BMW or Mini.

Sporty yet supple

Set-up for a well-sorted mix of agile and eager handling with fluently smooth ride comfort, the 308 Allure may be forgivingly soft-edged compared to a more sporting hot hatch, taking road imperfections in its stride, but is nevertheless a precise, responsive and intuitive drive. 

Quick and comfortable driving from point to point, the 308 Allure’s chassis is engaging and adjustable on throttle, while turn-in is tidy and alert, responding well to quick inputs from on centre. Its steering is light, quick and precise with decent road feel, while body control through corners is poised and reassuring, albeit with slight lean owing to its more comfortable set-up.

Responding well to early and tight turn-in, the 308’s front tyres grip well, while rear road-holding is reassuring. However, with weight shifting to the outside and rear through corners, its chassis proves agile, responsive and adjustably playful when one wants it to be, with a touch of mid-corner braking to pivot weight and tightening a cornering line. 

Composed, and stable at speed and refined, the 308 Allure is especially supple when dispatching bumps and cracks at a slight angle. Meanwhile, electronic stability controls are effective and un-intrusive in “off” position, where they remain active but allow more dynamic leeway.

Settled and stylish

Distinctly French in character and how it combines the sporty with the supple with finesse, the 308 Allure combines easily exploitable power with control and comfort. Taking lumps and bumps smoothly, the 308 pitches slightly vertically over swiftly driven peaks and crests, yet is settled and buttoned down on rebound.

Meanwhile, its tight turning circle makes it manoeuvrable in the city. With front and rear parking sensors, and reversing camera to better manoeuvre its bulging body in tight parking spaces, the features a low-set steering wheel and high-set instrument cluster to provide unimpeded front road visibility.

With a comfortable, supportive and well adjustable driving position, taller drivers might need a couple of attempts to find an ideal driving position with good instrument panel visibility and steering position. Refined inside, the 3008 Allure features classy finish and materials and user-friendly layouts with a stylishly minimalist ambiance. 

Spacious in front and with generous 470-litre boot that further expands with rear seats folded. Well equipped, Allure specification features include dual-zone climate control, six airbags, electronic brakeforce distribution, Isofix childseat latches, multi-function steering controls and a USB-enabled infotainment system.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 1.6-litre, turbocharged, transverse 4-cylinders

Bore x stroke: 77 x 85.8mm

Valve-train: 16-valve, DOHC, direct injection

Gearbox: 6-speed auto, front-wheel-drive

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 163 (165) [121] @5500rpm

Specific power: 102BHP/litre

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 177 (240) @1400rpm

Specific torque: 150.2Nm/litre

0-100km/h: under 8.5-seconds (est.)

Fuel tank: 53-litres

Length: 4253mm

Width: 1804mm

Height: 1457mm

Wheelbase: 2620mm

Track, F/R: 1559/1553mm

Overhang, F/R: 863/770mm

Headroom, F/R: 895/874mm

Shoulder room, F/R: 1395/1365mm

Boot capacity: 470-litres

Kerb weight: 1225kg (est.)

Steering: Electric-assisted rack and pinion

Suspension, F/R: MacPherson struts/torsion bar

Brakes, F/R: Ventilated discs/discs

Tyres, F/R: 225/45R17

God Help the Child

Toni Morrison

New York: Vintage Books, 2016

Pp. 178

Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison is perhaps the US’s greatest living writer. Each of her previous ten novels chronicles the experience of a particular group of African-Americans from slave times up through the 20th century, with plots showing the immeasurable damage inflicted by racism, but also how people built their lives and communities despite it. Morrison is among those writers and scholars who go way beyond recording the abuses of discrimination, to dissect race as a false construct. In her eleventh novel, “God Help the Child”, the protagonist and plot demolish the idea that skin colour is immutably linked to certain attributes.

This is the first of Morrison’s novels to be set in the present, and the story literally explodes with an unforgiving harshness reminiscent of her first book, “The Bluest Eye”. It revisits the latter’s theme of how racism unleashes child abuse, but this time the damage seems reversible, and the abuse is colour-blind, a generalised social ill. Unlike most of Morrison’s other books, “God Help the Child” includes quite a few white characters, positive and negative.

The birth of the main character, Lula Ann Bridewell, is a shock to her parents because she is so dark, whereas they are light-skinned. Her mother raises her with a heavy, unloving hand on the pretext of keeping her out of the trouble she anticipates the girl’s blue-black skin will cause in white-dominated society. Morrison lets the mother defend her meanness by narrating several chapters, justifying the twisted logic of “skin privileges”. Belatedly, she realises, “What you do to children matters. And they might never forget,” thus voicing a main theme of the novel. (p. 43) 

But she’s not the only guilty one; black or white, there are few innocents in this story. Despite the heaviness of the topic, Morrison plays with her characters, chuckling at their follies, sympathising with their weaknesses, nurturing their strengths, and indicting their wrongs. One feels she loves them, or some of them at least. 

Most of the story is told in first-person narrative, which makes the sometimes over-the-top things that occur seem totally credible. Perhaps Morrison is saying that people’s attitudes, imaginings and fears can have just as real an impact as physical events. Four other female voices (including that of a convicted child abuser) join the mother, going back and forth in time, to show the long-term effects of mistreating children. In contrast, the story of the main male character is told in third person.

After finishing high school, Lula Ann leaves home and hometown, and reinvents herself; she changes her name to Bride, embarks on a successful career and discovers that black is beautiful and she is beautiful. Her newly acquired self-esteem seems to make everything possible. Recalling the cruelty of white children in school, and her mother’s admonitions not to fight back, she concludes, “So I let the name-calling, the bullying travel like poison, like lethal viruses through my veins, with no antibiotic available. Which, actually, was a good thing now that I think of it, because I built up immunity so tough that not being a ‘nigger girl’ was all I needed to win. I became a deep dark beauty who doesn’t need Botox for kissable lips or tanning spas to hide a deathlike pallor”. (p. 57)

For a while, Bride leads a charmed life and finds the perfect man, but when he suddenly disappears for unclear reasons, she learns the limits of physical beauty and starts to revert to her little-girl, scared, miserable self: “there was nothing in the world left to do but stand up for herself finally and confront the first man she had bared her soul to.” (p. 79)

Searching for him, Bride incurs new mishaps but also meets new people who offer alternative paths to love and healing.

With wit, compassion and insight, Morrison tells an engrossing and deeply meaningful story that perches on the cutting edge of literature enriched by social commentary. The book is a joy to read due to her uncanny ability to describe a scene — beautiful or shocking, to nail down human emotions and motives in a few words, and to create complex characters who will be long remembered. In “God Help the child”, she not only addresses child abuse and the persistence of racism, but touches the raw nerve of one of the US’s greatest contemporary paradoxes: It’s hip to be black in the fashion and entertainment world, yet people of colour remain more likely to be murdered or incarcerated. Still, despite not underestimating adverse conditions, the story holds out hope: people can make what they want of themselves.

Sally Bland 

Using a powerful gene-editing technique, scientists have rid human embryos of a mutation that causes an inherited form of heart disease often deadly to healthy young athletes and adults in their prime.

The experiment marks the first time that scientists have altered the human genome to ensure a disease-causing mutation would disappear not only from the DNA of the subject on which it’s performed, but from the genes of his or her progeny as well.

The controversial procedure, known as “germ-line editing”, was conducted at Oregon Health & Science University using human embryos expressly created for the purpose. It was reported in the journal Nature.

The new research comes less than six months after the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine recommended that scientists limit their trials of human germ-line editing to diseases that could not be treated with “reasonable alternatives” — at least for now.

In a bid to make the experiment relevant to real-life dilemmas faced by parents who carry genes for inherited diseases, the researchers focused their editing efforts on a mutation that causes inherited hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

In this genetic condition, a parent who carries one normal and one faulty copy of a the MYBPC3 gene has a 50-50 chance of passing that mutation on to his or her offspring. If the child inherits the mutation, his or her heart muscle is likely to grow prematurely weak and stiff, causing heart failure and often early death.

In diseases where one parent carries such an “autosomal dominant” mutation, a couple will often seek the assistance of fertility doctors to minimise the risk of passing such a mutation on to a child. A woman’s egg production is medically stimulated, and eggs and sperm meet in a lab — a process called in vitro fertilisation. Then embryologists inspect the resulting embryos, cull the ones that have inherited an unwanted mutation, and transfer only unaffected embryos into a woman’s uterus to be carried to term.

In the new research, researchers set out to test whether germ-line gene editing could make the process of choosing healthy embryos more effective and efficient by creating more of them.

In the end, their experiment showed it could. The targeted correction of a disease-causing gene carried by a single parent “can potentially rescue a substantial portion of mutant human embryos, thus increasing the number of embryos available for transfer”, the authors wrote in Nature. Co-author Dr Paula Amato, an Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) professor of obstetrics and gynaecology, said the technique “could potentially decrease the number of cycles needed for people trying to have children free of genetic disease” if it’s found safe for use in fertility clinics.

Along the way, though, many of the researchers’ findings were scientifically surprising. Long-feared effects of germ-line editing, including collateral damage to “off-target” genetic sequences, scarcely materialised. And “mosaicism”, a phenomenon in which edited DNA appears in some but not all cells, was found to be minimal.

The study’s lead author, OHSU biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov, called these “exciting and surprising moments”. But he cautioned that “there is room to improve” the techniques demonstrated to produce mutation-free embryos. As for conducting human clinical trials of the germ-line correction, he said those would have to wait until results showed a near-perfect level of efficiency and accuracy, and could be limited by state and federal regulations.

Eventually, Mitalipov said, such germ-line gene editing might also make it easier for parents who carry other gene mutations that follow a similar pattern of inheritance — including some that cause breast and ovarian cancers, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy — to have healthy children who would not pass those genes to their own offspring.

“There is still a long road ahead,” predicted Mitalipov, who heads the Centre for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at the Portland university.

The research drew a mix of praise and concern from experts in genetic medicine.

Dr Richard O. Hynes, who co-chaired the National Academies’ report issued in February, called the new study “very good science” that advances understanding of genetic repair on many fronts. Hynes, who was not involved with the latest research effort, said he was “pleasantly surprised” by researchers’ “clever modifications” and their outcomes.

“It’s likely to become feasible, technically — not tomorrow, not next year, but in some foreseeable time. Less than a decade, I’d say,” said Haynes, a biologist and cancer researcher at MIT and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

University of California, Berkeley molecular and cell biologist Jennifer Doudna, one of pioneers of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique, acknowledged the new research highlights a prospective use of gene editing for one inherited disease and offers some insights into the process.

But Doudna questioned how broadly the experiment’s promising results would apply to other inherited diseases. She said she does not believe the use of germ-line editing as a means to improve efficiency at infertility clinics meets the criteria laid out by the National Academies of Science, which urged that the techniques only be explored as treatment for diseases with “no reasonable alternative”.

“Already, 50 per cent of embryos would be normal,” said Doudna. “Why not just implant those?”

Doudna said she worried that the new findings “will encourage people to proceed down this road” before the scientific and ethical implications of germ-line editing have been fully considered.

“A large group of experts concluded that clinical use should not proceed until and unless there’s broad societal consensus, and that just hasn’t happened,” Doudna said. “This study underscores the urgency of having those debates. Because it’s coming.”

WASHINGTON — Two months ago, Marcus Hutchins was an “accidental hero”, a young computer whiz living with his parents in Britain who found the “kill switch” to the devastating WannaCry ransomware.

Today, the 23-year-old is in a US federal prison, charged with creating and distributing malicious software designed to attack the banking system.

His arrest this week stunned the computer security community and shines a light on the shadowy world of those who sometimes straddle the line between legal and illegal activities.

Hutchins’ arrest following Def Con in Las Vegas, one of the world’s largest gathering of hackers, delivered “an extreme shock”, according to Gabriella Coleman, a McGill University professor who studies the hacker community.

“The community at Def Con would not admire a hacker who was doing hard core criminal activity for profit or damage — that is frowned upon,” Coleman told AFP.

“But there are people who do security research... who understand that sometimes in order to improve security, you have to stick your nose in areas that may break the law. They don’t want to hurt anyone but they are doing it for research.”

Hackers are generally classified as “white hats” if they stay within the law and “black hats” if they cross the line.

At gatherings like Def Con, “you have people who dabble on both sides of the fence”, said Rick Holland, vice president at the security firm Digital Shadows.

An indictment unsealed by US authorities charges Hutchins and a second individual — whose name was redacted — of making and distributing in 2014 and 2015 the Kronos “banking Trojan”, a reference to malicious software designed to steal user names and passwords used at online banking sites.

Hacker mindset

James Scott, a senior fellow who follows cyber security at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, said it is sometimes difficult to separate the white hats from the black hats.

The hacker mindset includes “an insatiable need to satisfy their intellectual curiosity”, Scott said. 

“Hackers have that thing, they can’t sleep. It’s persistent and it’s constant and it can drive you nuts.”

Scott said he did not know details of the Hutchins case but that it is possible he wrote code that someone else “weaponised”.

Some friends and collaborators of Hutchins said they found the allegations hard to believe.

“He worked with me on a project in 2014 he refused payment for,” said a tweet from Jake Williams of Rendition InfoSec. “This is incongruous with a black hat writing code for money at the same time.”

Security researcher Andrew Mabbitt tweeted that Hutchins “spent his career stopping malware, not writing it.”

Chilling effect

Regardless of the outcome of the case, some security professionals said the arrest could erode trust between the hacker community and law enforcement.

Coleman said many hackers and researchers already tread carefully in light of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that makes it illegal to access a computer system without authorisation and has been roundly criticised by some security professionals.

“The statute is very broad and it can be wielded as a tool against researchers,” Coleman said.

She noted that many in the hacker community are still reeling over the 2013 suicide of activist Aaron Swartz, who was charged under the same law for illegally downloading academic journals.

Hutchins’ arrest “might actually drive certain security researchers further underground”, said John Dickson of Denim Group, a security consultancy.

“I know several security researchers from Europe, whom I consider on the ‘white hat’ side of the house, who will no longer travel to the US to be on the safe side.”

Holland of Digital Shadows added that it may lead to “strains in the security community, and it could make people more circumspect about who they may collaborate with.”

Scott said the arrest may be counterproductive for cyber security because hackers like Hutchins help expose security flaws in order to fix them.

“The establishment needs hackers more than hackers need the establishment,” he said. 

Scott added that Hutchins’ obvious talents could make him an asset for national security instead of a liability.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if a federal agency made him an offer he can’t refuse,” Scott said.

“A guy like that should be at Fort Meade,” he added, referring to the headquarters of the National Security Agency.