Philip Bethge

Author: Philip Bethge

  • Technology Pioneer David Gelernter: ‘Love Is Beyond Watson’

    What does Watson’s Jeopardy victory tell us? Not much, says David Gelernter, the computer science pioneer and Yale professor. SPIEGEL spoke with Gelernter about the prospects of achieveing artifically-created consciousness and the belief that eternal life can be secured on a hard drive.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, the American journalist Ambrose Bierce described the word we are looking for as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage.” Do you know what we mean?

    Gelernter: I don’t.

    SPIEGEL: It’s love. It’s a question from the TV show Jeopardy, and the IBM supercomputer Watson had no problem finding the solution. So does that mean Watson knows what love is?

    Gelernter: He doesn’t have the vaguest idea. The field of artificial intelligence has not even started to address how emotions are represented cognitively, what makes a belief and so forth. The problem is, I don’t think only with my mind. I think with my body and my mind together. There’s no such thing as love without bodily input, output, reaction and response. So love is beyond Watson.

    SPIEGEL: Why, then, is Watson still doing well at Jeopardy?

    Gelernter: Because the body is not involved in playing Jeopardy. You don’t have to mean or to believe a single thing you say. The game is superficial enough to be winnable by an entity with no emotions, no sensations, and no self.

    SPIEGEL: Still, Watson’s opponents, Jeopardy all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, said in interviews that they had the feeling they were playing against a human. How come we can even consider Watson being on a par with us?

    Gelernter: I even consider my macaw Ike to be on a par with me (laughs and points to his macaw). But seriously, I’d rather chat with Watson than with some of the people in my department at Yale. Any baby with a teddy bear immediately anthropomorphizes the teddy bear. We want to see images of ourselves, mirrors of ourselves. Anthropomorphizing is a powerful human urge. So I have no problems calling Watson a “he.” That’s a normal human response.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Watson defeated Jennings and Rutter in the competition recently with staggering ease. If not human-like, can Watson at least tell us something about the human mind?

    Gelernter: Watson was not built to study the human mind. And the IBM people don’t claim that they’ve solved any cognitive problems. Watson was built to win Jeopardy. That’s it. For that purpose, it is drawing heavy on the parallel programming strategy. This strategy explicitly says: forget about the brain. The question is, can we burn raw computing power in such a way that we can create something that’s able to compete with a human? The result is an extraordinary piece of technology that — unlike IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue — has major implications for applied artificial intelligence.

    Computers Don’t Know What Pain Is

    SPIEGEL: But could you bring yourself to call a machine like that “intelligent”?

    Gelernter: The question is how superficial you are willing to be with your definition of “intelligence.” When we think of it seriously, intelligence implies a self who is intelligent, an entity that can sense its thoughts, is aware of the fact that it’s thinking and that it is manifesting intelligence. None of that is part of Watson by design.

    SPIEGEL: But let’s assume that we start feeding Watson with poetry instead of encyclopedias. In a few years time it might even be able to talk about emotions. Wouldn’t that be a step on the way to at least showing human-like behavior?

    Gelernter: Yes. However, the gulf between human-like behavior and human behavior is gigantic. Feeding poetry into Watson as opposed to encyclopedias is not going to do any good. Feed him Keats, and he will read “My heart aches, and a drowsing numbness pains my senses.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? When a poet writes “my heart aches” it’s an image, but it originates in an actual physical feeling. You feel something in the center of your chest. Or take “a drowsing numbness pains my senses”: Watson can’t know what drowsy means because he’s never fallen asleep. He doesn’t know what pain is. He has no purchase on poetry at all. Still, he could win at Jeopardy if the category were English Romantic poets. He would probably even do much better than most human contestants at not only saying Keats wrote this but explaining the references. There’s a lot of data involved in any kind of scholarship or assertion, which a machine can do very well. But it’s a fake.

    SPIEGEL: What is so special about the human brain that the machine can’t replicate it?

    Gelernter: The brain is radically different from the machine. Physics and chemistry are fundamental to its activity. The brain moves signals from one neuron to another by using a number of different neurotransmitters. It is made out of cells with certain properties, built out of certain proteins. It is a very elaborate piece of biology. The computer on the other hand is a purely electronic machine made out of semiconductors and other odds and ends. I can’t replicate the brain on a chip just in the same way I can’t replicate orange juice on a chip. Orange juice is just not the same thing as a chip.

    SPIEGEL: Are you serious about your statement that a machine won’t truly be able to think until it can daydream and hallucinate?

    Gelernter: Absolutely. We go through an oscillation between different mental states several times during the day, and you can’t understand the mind without understanding this spectrum. We have wide-awakeness, high energy, high level of concentration, which is associated with analytical capacities. And at the other end of the spectrum, we are exhausted, our thoughts are drifting. In that state, our thoughts are arranged in a different way. We start to freely associate. Take Rilke: All of a sudden it occurred to him that the flight of a swallow in the twilight sky is like a crack in a teapot. It’s a very strange image but a very striking image. Certainly, nobody else ever said it before. These sorts of new analogies and new images give rise to creativity, but also to scientific insights. Emotion has a lot to do with it. Why do you combine a bird flying with a piece of ceramic with a crack? Because, at least in Rilke’s mind, they are tagged with a similar emotion.

    SPIEGEL: But we are certainly able to think without getting so poetic.

    Gelernter: True. At the upper end of the spectrum, when my thoughts are disciplined by the logical rules of induction, analogies play no part. I have hypotheses, and I work my way through to conclusions. That kind of intelligence doesn’t need emotions, and it doesn’t need a body. But it is also of almost no importance to human beings. We think purely logically, analytically, roughly zero percent of our time. However, when I am thinking creatively, when I am inventing new analogies, I can’t do that without my emotional faculty. The body is intensely involved; it created the fuel that drives that process by engendering emotions.

    SPIEGEL: But even Watson might soon be able to come up with interesting analogies. Just give him the right books to read.

    Gelernter: It’s possible to build a machine that is capable of what seems like creativity — even a machine that can hallucinate. But it wouldn’t be like us at all. It would always be a fake, a facade. So, it is perfectly plausible that “Watson 2050” will win some poetry contests. It might write a magnificent sonnet that I find beautiful and moving and that becomes famous all over the world. But does that mean that Watson has a mind, a sense of self? No, of course not. There is nobody at home.

    SPIEGEL: Can you be sure?

    Gelernter: There is nothing inside.

    SPIEGEL: How can you know, then, that somebody is at home within another human being?

    Gelernter: I know what I am. I am a human being. If you are a human being too, my belief is you are intelligent. And not because you passed a test, not because you showed me you can do calculus or translate Latin. You could be fast asleep, somebody could ask, “Is he intelligent?” And I will say, “Yes, of course. He’s a human being.” The only intelligence everyone has ever experienced firsthand is his own. There is no objective test for intelligence in others. The observable behavior tells you nothing about what is within. The only way we can confidently ascribe intelligence is by seeing a creature like us.

    “Scientists Will Never Reproduce a Human Mind”

    SPIEGEL: There is a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a group of scientists are trying to recreate the brain’s biology in each and every detail, one neuron at a time, in a supercomputer. They hope to replicate a complete human brain within a decade. Wouldn’t that be “a creature like us”?

    Gelernter: They could produce a very accurate brain simulator. They may be able to predict the behavior of the brain down to the transmission of signals. But they’re not going to produce a mind any more than a hurricane simulator produces a hurricane.

    SPIEGEL: Other scientists are far more optimistic. Regardless of all the obstacles, they say, the exponentially growing number of transistors on a chip will provide us with virtually infinite possibilities. If we connect huge numbers of computer chips in the right way and give them the right tasks to perform, then at some point consciousness will emerge.

    Gelernter: It is impossible to create mental states by writing software — no matter how sophisticated it gets. If a simple computer can’t produce orange juice, a much more complicated computer won’t do any better. Computer chips are just the wrong substrate, the wrong stuff for consciousness. Now, can some kind of a miracle happen if you put a lot of them together? Maybe. But I have no reason to believe that such a miracle will happen.

    SPIEGEL: Given that we can manage a really good fake, a robot that pretends to be conscious in a convincing way — would we even notice if it wasn’t the real thing?

    Gelernter: It already makes no difference to us. Just take the robots in Iraq and Afghanistan where they search for mines and so forth. The men on the front lines become emotionally attached to their robots, they’re sad when they are destroyed. And 50 years from now, robots will be much better. There are a lot of lonely people in the world. So now they have a robot, and it is around all the time, chats with them. Sure they will be attached to it. The robot will know all about them. The robot will be able to say things like, “How are you feeling this morning? I realize your back was hurting yesterday.” Will people have human-type feelings towards the robots? Absolutely. And then the question becomes: Does it matter that, in this sense, they are being defrauded? The answer is, given the scarcity of companionship in the world, it probably doesn’t matter in practical terms. However, it certainly matters philosophically. If you care about what it is to be a human being, the robot is not going to tell you.

    SPIEGEL: Things might change if you give him a near-perfect body, equipped with sensors that help him feel things and explore his environment like humans do.

    Gelernter: In that case the machine would be capable of simulating humanness much more effectively. But a fake body attached to a computer is still not going to generate real sensations. If you knocked your foot on something, your brain registers what we call pain. If you think of something good that is going to happen tomorrow, the body responds by feeling good, then the mind feels better and so forth. This feedback loop is very important to human behavior. A fake body, however, is still just binary switches with voltage levels going up and down.

    SPIEGEL: The American computer scientist Ray Kurzweil argues that the Internet itself might be on the brink of becoming super-intelligent, just because it will have computing power beyond imagination. And his beliefs are gaining in popularity. Why are these ideas so attractive?

    Gelernter: Because creating the mind is the philosopher’s stone of the Digital Age. In the Middle Ages, the alchemists tried to produce gold. Now they’ve moved over to the mind. Don’t get me wrong: They are going to produce a lot of interesting science along the way. But they are not going to get a mind.

    If You’re Dead, You’re Dead

    SPIEGEL: The so-called Singularity Movement predicts the advance of highly intelligent machines that will one day perhaps even become part of our bodies.

    Gelernter: We are being offered more ways than ever to destroy humanity by negating the significance of humanness. In the science fiction community there are those who say, “I will live forever insofar as I will be able to take my entire mind state and upload it to some server, and then I can die, but it doesn’t matter if my mind stays there.” Now, any two-year-old child can see the flaw in this argument: When you die, you are dead, and it doesn’t matter if there is one copy or a billion copies of what your mind was before you died. It doesn’t matter to you. You’re still dead. The great philosophical analogy of the second half of the 20th century was that mind is to brain the way software is to computer. But this is ridiculous. There is no analogy between mind and software.

    SPIEGEL: Why not?

    Gelernter: If you have some software, you can make as many copies as you like. You can put it on a million different computers, and it is always exactly the same software. Minds, however, run on exactly one platform. You can’t swap the mind out to some storage medium and then run it again after keeping it offline.

    SPIEGEL: Hypothetically, what would happen if you managed to transfer one person’s brain into another person’s body?

    Gelernter: There would be no mind anymore. As you took the brain from somebody and put it into somebody else’s head, the mind that you used to have is gone because that mind was part of a body and responsive to that body. From a medical standpoint, the question is if the brain is a flexible enough organism to re-tune itself to a different kind of input from a different body. But the original mind would definitely be lost.

    SPIEGEL: Assuming those popular visions of Artificial Intelligence won’t come true in the foreseeable future, where do you see AI research going in the next decade?

    Gelernter: My hope is that the philosophy of mind and cognitive science will develop a very sophisticated theory of how the mind works. The philosophy of mind has been dazzled by computing, which led down the wrong path. We have to get rid of this ridiculous obsession with computing, which has done tremendous damage. People worrying about singularity should go back and read Nietzsche. They should try and understand Kafka seriously. They should read a poet like William Wordsworth. Now, in an entirely separate effort, Artificial Intelligence will produce more and more powerful machines. We’ll rely on them heavily. They will fix problems and answer questions for us all the time. No one will claim that they have minds, least of all the people who built the programs.

    SPIEGEL: One of those powerful assistants might well be a descendent of Watson. Let’s assume it has been shrunken to the size of a pea, and it could be plugged into our brains. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all that knowledge on hand within your own body?

    Gelernter: I can have all of Watson’s knowledge available already — by just opening my laptop. Does it matter to me if I can get the answer not in 10 seconds but in 10 microseconds? It really depends on how I define my integrity as a human being. Could I get more direct access to a million completely meaningless disconnected facts if I implanted a Watson chip and then go onto Jeopardy? I would win Jeopardy. However, it would give me no happiness, no satisfaction, no feeling of triumph, no feeling of accomplishment.

    SPIEGEL: You wouldn’t feel tempted to get yourself a Watson?

    Gelernter: Sure I would. This is a brilliant, exciting piece of technology. I don’t want to take anything away from it. It puts AI on a track that is going to produce fascinating technology. It uses exactly what we are rich in, namely pure primitive computer power, to produce sophisticated answers to complex questions. We need that ability, and Watson can do it.

    SPIEGEL: Would you trade your macaw for Watson, if you had to choose?

    Gelernter: No way would I trade my macaw in for any piece of software. Look at him. He’s got a face. He’s got a big smile on his beak. He’s a creature who does have emotions, who has interests, and who is a member of the family. You’d have to offer me a lot more than Watson for my macaw.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, thank you very much for talking to us.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Manfred Dworschak

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • ‘People are basically good’: Twitter-Founder Biz Stone on the networks revolutionary power

    Isaac “Biz” Stone, 36, reportedly set up Twitter with his buddy Jack Dorsey in only two weeks in 2006. Meanwhile, the Network has over 175 million users worldwide.

    Q: Mr. Stone, the movie „The Social Network“ depicts how Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg bullied his way to be the youngest billionaire of all times. Would it be possible to tell a similar story about Twitter?

    Stone: I don’t think we’re quite interesting enough to be a movie. We’re not like the dorm room startup and there is not enough intrigue.

    Q: However, you burned three CEO already, after only three years in business. What went wrong?

    Stone: This has a lot to do with what Twitter needed at different times. In 2009 we had about three million users. Now we have about 175 million. For a long time we were working on reliability and we achieved that. But always fighting fires kept us from developing a strong vision what Twitter could be in the future. That’s what we are trying to do right now with a new CEO. And the recent relaunch of Twitter shows it.

    Q: What is Twitter today and how would you explain it to new potential users?

    Stone: Twitter today is a real-time information network that spans everything from your friends’ updates to global news and events. There are 90 million tweets being created every day, and all of these tweets are being archived at subsecond speed by our search engine, which means for any person in the world there’s pretty much going to be something relevant to them in the Twitter network. So I always advise people to search Twitter about something that interests you, whether it’s sports, the name of your company, your city, what’s going on in your neighborhood, and get into it that way.

    Q: But people are overwhelmed anyway with information from the net.

    Stone: I agree, we are living now in an age of infinite information. And we can’t look at all of it. So relevance and timeliness have to be things that we have to pay a lot of attention to. We want people to be able to get the information when and where they need it and without having to sift through it all, so that they can move on with their lives.

    Q: There are millions of tweets like „I am drinking coffee right now“ – nothing anybody needs to know. Is there really a way, to find relevant information in 90 million short messages?

    Stone: Yeah, I think there is. Firstly, by following specific subjects or people on Twitter, you choose yourself which information is relevant to you. But that means that you’re missing out on a lot that potentially could interest you. Therefore, when you search for something in Twitter, we also show you the tweets that relate to your search and that were last created, just seconds ago. As an example, think of the situation a few years ago when that plane landed in the Hudson River. On Twitter, you were able to find that one first picture of that plane on the Hudson just half an hour after the crash.

    Q: You call Twitter even a „triumph of humanity“. Isn‘t that a little bit over the top?

    Stone: If Twitter is going to be a triumph at all, I believe that it will not be a triumph of technology but indeed of humanity. It really depends on what people are going to do with this simple tool; if they help each other during time of crisis, if they raise spontaneous amounts of money for people after a crisis or if they self-organize during a political upheaval. Twitter is designed to work on every phone across the planet because tweets fit in the international character limit for SMS. And there are more than five billion people using mobile phones in the world. This is so empowering. For example, if something happens in China, in Iran, in Haiti or anywhere else halfway around the world, you are able to find out about it instantly on this network because the relevant tweets are rising up and are becoming visible. That makes us realize that we are not just citizens of one country but of the world and that we are all in this together.

    Q: But does that really change anything? Looking at Iran for example: Despite Twitter the situation hasn’t really changed, has it?

    Stone: It depends on what you describe as change. Twitter isn’t in the business of changing a situation in another country. It’s in the business of allowing people to connect and share information about what’s going on. Think about China: Twitter is blocked in China. But people use Twitter in China because they’re figuring out ways around that block.

    Q: Critics believe that real political movements need a strong network and supervision. A flat hierarchy of just well-linked activists would even most likely disturb a real movement. Can Twitter push forward real change?

    Stone: Nobody here at Twitter with their head screwed on right would say that writing a tweet is equivalent to starting a revolution; neither is forwarding an email or updating your status or any of these things. But to say that Twitter would not play a complimentary role in any meaningful event in the world today is an absurd statement. A communication network that allows for information to spread very quickly, very virally, very effectively, can be used in any kind of situation.

    Q: Does that mean that Twitter is in effect a journalistic format?

    Stone: I don‘t think so. But the idea of the teaming up between Twitter and journalism is very powerful. I think Twitter has a knack for breaking news very quickly. So if there’s an earthquake, you’ll find out about it on Twitter before you’ll find out about it at the news desk. But what you won’t have then is what journalism provides, which is the fuller context of the story. What does it mean in relation to the previous three earthquakes and what geo-economic impact is it having on the region?

    Q: The editing and distribution of information was always a domain of professional journalists, and for good reasons. Today, if there is for example a political upheaval, people go to Twitter first. Isn‘t there a big risk of manipulation. How can people distinguish between trustworthy sources and others?

    Stone: Like any tool, Twitter can be used for good and for evil. However, what we’ve noticed over a decade of developing these kinds of systems is, that disinformation has a very short shelf life on these open networks. These networks tend to be self-policing. When you have some people trying to spread disinformation, you have more people debunking that and coming at it with the truth.

    Q: North Korea, for example, is sending out Tweets on a regular basis. Have you ever considered blocking Twitter accounts like that?

    Stone: Removing tweets from the system is something we don’t take lightly. We take free speech and openness very seriously, and there’s only a few scenarios in which we would remove content, like if it is breaking the law. But we can definitely highlight the more relevant information. For us, it is tremendeously important to be relevant and meaningful. We need a network that is important to peoples lives. Otherwise, we won‘t be able to make any revenue.

    Q: Twitter hasn‘t been able to generate a lot of profit so far. How exactly are you going to make money in the future?

    Stone: We are making money already. People don‘t realize this, because we are doing such a good job at our original plan. We optimized for value before profit in the first couple of years. And now we are seeing companies like the airline Jetblue or the coffee chain Starbuck’s using Twitter. And even more encouraging, people are willing to follow these accounts by the millions.

    Q: And the companies pay you money for that service?

    Stone: They pay money if we promote their tweets by putting them for example on top of our so called trend list, which can be found on the Twitter homepage. Anything that’s promoted is very clearly marked. So users can decide themselves if they want to read and follow promoted information. This is working exceptionally well for new products people are already talking about or for things like movies …

    Q: … some believe that because of Twitter they may predict if a movie becomes a blockuster or not…

    Stone: .. exactly. And the advertisers are loving it. Our ads are not banners that we are sticking in front of you that have nothing to do with anything. Our ads are tweets and are therefore part of the natural Twitter experience. In a lot of cases, you’re not even noticing that they are ads.

    Q: Is Germany a big market for you?

    Stone: It is. Germany is one of the first places that we translated the web interface into, and this year we have seen 80 percent growth in Germany. Japan was the first place that we saw such an explosion, and now Germany, France and Italy.

    Q: The Germans do really mind their privacy …

    Stone: … well, yes, and the good thing about Twitter is that we’re very, very clear about our policies in this respect. We tell people that Twitter is a very public and open service. Here in the US, tweets are going to go on CNN, they’re going to go in the Library of Congress of the United States, which is archiving public tweets. Once you send out a tweet, it is out there. We’ve tried to make this abundantly clear.

    Q: Do you still read a newspaper?

    Stone: Well, actually I read Google news, and so wherever Google news sends me is where I end up. So I guess I’m putting my faith in Googles algorithms to determine what I should and what I shouldn’t read. I don’t know if that’s the best way to do it or not.

    Q: And you really think that people will do good just because they can share information?

    Stone: I believe that people are basically good, and if you give them a very simple tool that allows them to express that basic goodness, they will. We’ve seen it over and over again. The more people are connected on something like Twitter, the more empathy they begin to feel for people who are halfway around the world. They are suddenly walking in the other people’s shoes in a way that they might not have done in the past. I think this really brings people together.

  • The Tiger Mother’s Bite: ‘A Story in Favor of Coercion, Chinese-Style’

    Law professor, mother and author Amy Chua’s memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” has touched off an angry debate in the United States on parenting styles. In an interview with SPIEGEL, Chua talks about drilling her daughters and threatening to burn their stuffed animals in order to motivate them to learn.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Chua, according to your book, your daughters Sophia and Louisa were never allowed to attend a sleepover, have a friend over to play or choose their own extracurricular activities. Do your daughters hate you?

    Chua: I hope not! I required Sophia and Lulu to be fluent in Chinese and in English and to be straight-A students. Sophia knew the alphabet at 18 months. In nursery school, while the other kids were learning to count from one to ten, I taught her addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and decimals. By the time she was three, she was reading Sartre. Of course, I also wanted my kids to have hobbies and activities — not just any activities, like crafts, which can lead nowhere, but rather something meaningful and highly difficult with the potential for depth and virtuosity.

    SPIEGEL: You insisted, for example, that Sophia and Lulu do classical music and learn to play the piano and the violin, which is, in your own words “the opposite of decline, of laziness, vulgarity and spoiledness.” Do those words describe your view on Western education?

    Chua: It wasn’t the intent of my book to teach other people. It is a memoir and not a parenting book. But I do think that Western parents sometimes take things too easy. It’s too simple to say to your kid: “I just want you to be happy. Make your own choices.” You can’t tell a six-year-old: “Today, pursue your passions.” I think it’s sort of a romanticization. Of course, you’re hoping that they will suddenly pick up the flute or, you know, write poetry. But I think they’ll just sit in front of the TV or play computer games.

    SPIEGEL: Your methods to keep your kids on track are controversial to say the least. For example, you said to Sophia while supervising her piano practicing: “Oh my god, you are just getting worse and worse; if the next time is not perfect, I am going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them.” You are currently being demonized in the United States for using such methods to keep your kids in line.

    Chua: In restrospect, the coaching might seem a bit extreme. On the other hand, it was highly effective. When Sophia was nine she won a local piano award.

    SPIEGEL: Later on, she even played in Carnegie Hall …

    Chua: Exactly. And she loved it. “Nothing is fun until you’re good at it” is one of my lines. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude because the child will resist. Things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: So, what are the ingredients for successful Chinese motherhood?

    Chua: I think it’s love and listening, coupled with having high expectations. Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. They demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough. For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong.

    SPIEGEL: Why can’t the mother just be happy about it?

    Chua: Because Chinese parenting is about helping your children be the best they can be — which is usually better than they think. It’s about believing in your child more than anyone else. If done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence. Rote repetition is underrated in the Western world. Western parents give up too quickly.

    SPIEGEL: There is this episode in the book where Lulu worked on a piano piece and couldn’t do it. You hauled her dollhouse to the car and told her you would donate it to the Salvation Army. You threatened her with no Christmas presents and no birthday parties for years. Finally, you practiced with her into the night, and you wouldn’t let her get up, even to go to the bathroom. That sounds almost like torture.

    CHhua: I know. It’s so funny. People exaggerate that so much, they say: “Oh, my God, it’s like Guantanamo Bay!” This is actually a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. After all that struggle, out of the blue, Lulu suddenly did it. Her hands suddenly came together. A moment later, she was beaming. “Mommy, look — it’s easy!”

    SPIEGEL: You come from a traditional Chinese immigrant family and were clearly raised in a similar way. One time your father even called you “garbage.”

    Chua: My father called me “garbage” exactly once, and I know exactly when it was. My mother said something, and I said: “Shut up. I hate you.” And my father jumped in. But people get it wrong. Really, what he meant was “shame on you,” and he was right. It was exactly the same with my daughter Sophia. I said it only once to her in exactly the same circumstances.

    SPIEGEL: You say that the book is actually a love story. How can you talk of love when you are drilling your children all day?

    Chua: I am sure that my kids always knew that I love them. If the message you sent is “if yood, it’s like Guantanamo Bay!” This is actually a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. After all that struggle, out of the blue, Lulu suddenly did it. Her hands suddenly came together. A moment later, she was beaming. “Mommy, look — it’s easy!”

    SPIEGEL: You come from a traditional Chinese immigrant family and were clearly raised in a similar way. One time your father even called you “garbage.”

    Chua: My father called me “garbage” exactly once, and I know exactly when it was. My mother said something, and I said: “Shut up. I hate you.” And my father jumped in. But people get it wrong. Really, what he meant was “shame on you,” and he was right. It was exactly the same with my daughter Sophia. I said it only once to her in exactly the same circumstances.

    SPIEGEL: You say that the book is actually a love story. How can you talk of love when you are drilling your children all day?

    Chua: I am sure that my kids always knew that I love them. If the message you sent is “if you don’t get an A, I won’t love you” — that’s the worst parenting. That’s not what I am talking about. The message is really, “I think you can get the A because I believe in you. You’re a strong, smart, great kid.” Once a child starts to excel at something — whether it’s math, piano, pitching or ballet — he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence, and I do think that that can produce happiness.

    SPIEGEL: Do you really think happiness comes only through academic acheivement?

    Chua: I think the key is creating true self-esteem. I am very skeptical if you just keep telling your children: “You’re great. You’re perfect. You’re No. 1. Don’t worry.” Eventually, they have to go into the real world. And if they haven’t excelled at something, they probably won’t be able to get the job they want. I don’t think that’s a formula for happiness. I wanted my daughters to learn that through hard work and not giving up, you can actually be good at things.

    SPIEGEL: Do you think that high expectations can also be harmful? Asian-American girls aged 15 to 24 have above-average suicide rates.

    Chua: Well, first, that’s just tragic. But I’ve been bombarded with these statistics from all sides, and I would really want to get some solid evidence. It just seems very anecdotal to me. I truly don’t believe that Western kids are happier than Asian kids. I think it’s even, maybe even the opposite. However, pressuring your kids so much that they feel they can’t take it is terrible.

    SPIEGEL: Did you place to much pressure on your children? Your daughter Lulu rebelled in an extreme way at the age of 13 …

    Chua: … yes, she inherited my hot-tempered, viper-tongued, fast-forgiving personality …

    SPIEGEL: You were sitting in Moscow in a restaurant close to Red Square and you got angry at her because she didn’t want to try the caviar.

    Chua: She screamed: “I hate you! You are a terrible mother! I hate my life! I hate the violin!” She got really upset. And it suddenly felt that everything was falling apart. I thought: “Have I done everything wrong? Am I going to just lose my daughter?” I got up and ran as fast as I could, not knowing where I was going. Finally I went back and said, “Lulu, you win. It’s over. We are giving up the violin.”

    SPIEGEL: She chose to play tennis instead.

    Chua: Yes. And it was painful for me. She loved music and she was very good at it. And I knew that you can’t be a great tennis player if you start at 13. But I know it was the right choice for her. And what’s fun about Lulu right now is that her coach says she doesn’t give up. She is hard on herself. She drills.

    SPIEGEL: Many Western educators believe that drilling kills creativity, and that it’s more important to develop children’s imaginations.

    Chua: I do focus a lot on creativity, but rather than playing with wood or sand, I expose them to more ideas and more differences. I travel with them to foreign countries and take them to museums.

    SPIEGEL: Your book has produced angry protests in the US, and you have been called “Monster Mom.”

    Chua: Yes. I knew, of course, that the book would be provocative. But what has happened is surreal. People don’t realize that the book is about the journey of one mother. In the end, I completely questioned what I had done. I guess there might be a geopolitical dimension to it. Shanghai just got this very good test result in the Pisa study of the OECD (an educational survey of countries conducted by the Office for Economic Cooperation and Development). The Rising Tiger worries a lot of people.

    SPIEGEL: You say that in the meantime you have become more Western. Are your daughters allowed to have sleepovers?

    Chua: I will tell you a secret: Today is actually Lulu’s 15th birthday. And last Saturday we just had a sleepover for seven girls.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Chua, we thank you for this interview.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • ‘Starfish, Daisies and Raying Purple Forms’: Oliver Sacks on the Wonder of Sight

    Oliver Sacks (© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons)
    Oliver Sacks (© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons)

    In a SPIEGEL interview, New York neurologist and author Oliver Sacks discusses his new book, “The Mind’s Eye,” which explores how creative people compensate for their sight disorders or blindness. He also discusses his own “face blindness,” which makes it difficult to recognize people.

    (–> photo-gallery OPTICAL ILLUSIONS)

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Sacks, five years ago, you were diagnosed with a melanoma in your right eye. You thought you would die soon. What has happened since?

    Sacks: Well, obviously, I didn’t die. I was told that a melanoma in the eye is more benign than I previously thought, but in those early weeks after the diagnosis, I was still very prone to fear and a sort of black humor. Fortunately, that fear has largely gone away. My feeling now is that time is doubly precious.

    SPIEGEL: How is your eye these days?

    Sacks: I am actually a little shy about it. I feel it does look bad …

    SPIEGEL: … not at all!

    Sacks: … well, I bled into the eye and I can’t see through it. So I regard the eye as being out of action. And whether I will recover any sight in it, I don’t know.

    SPIEGEL: Did the tumor change your perception?

    Sacks: When this presented itself, I noticed that a segment of my vision was missing. I always use the ceiling fan for checking my visual fields. And in the three weeks while I was waiting for surgery, I went from missing one blade to missing three blades. After surgery, my vision was becoming distorted, so that, for example, people looked as if they were elongated and tilted over to one side, almost insect-like. And faces had these strange, sort of puffy protoplasmic extrusions. There was a Francis Bacon exhibit here a while back that reminded me of that.

    SPIEGEL: Did you see things that weren’t there?

    Sacks: You mean hallucinations? Yes, I did, and I do have them. I tend to see things like little starfish, daisies and raying purple forms … let me bring you something … I kept one or two notes … so that’s my journal (he returns with a huge pile of notebooks).

    SPIEGEL: In your new book, you describe the blind spot in your right eye as a “gaping nowhere.”

    Sacks: Wait, I’ll show you what it looked like, I made a drawing of it. See, it has more or less the shape of Australia. It causes me a lot of trouble when I bump into people or lamp posts, but it sometimes fills me with wonder, too. One day, for example, I looked at my foot with my right eye and sort of amputated it with my blind spot, a little above the ankle. But when I moved my foot a little, wiggling the toes, the stump seemed to grow a translucent pink extension with a ghostly protoplasmic halo around it. As I continued wiggling my toes, this took on a more definite form until, after a minute or so, I had a complete phantom foot.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: You specialize in treating patients with neurological disorders. Now you’ve turned into a case study yourself. Do you see this as some sort of dark irony?

    Sacks: I do think that it’s a particular irony. Stereo vision for example, which you can only truly have with two eyes, has always been very important for me. From the age of 10 or even earlier, I have loved stereo photography and stereograms. For many people, this loss probably sounds trivial, maybe because they’re not so conscious of having it; and if they lose it, they hardly notice it. But for people like me, it’s really bad.

    SPIEGEL: There are other ways for the brain to calculate depth: perspective, movement, shadows. People with vision in only one eye can even drive motorcycles.

    Sacks: But they can’t experience depth! And they don’t know what they miss. I once asked a friend, Sue Barry, who was cross-eyed all her life, if she could imagine stereo vision and she said, “Sure I can.” But later, through vision therapy and with the help of special glasses, she gained stereo vision and found herself in a truly spectacular new world. She loved it and came to me and said: “I was wrong.” No one without it can imagine what stereo vision is like, just as a totally colorblind person can’t imagine what color is like.

    SPIEGEL: All your case studies seem to have a common theme: the remarkable ability of the brain to compensate and adapt. How do you cope?

    Sacks: I don’t think that I have adapted very well. I use a stick now because high curbs are a special danger for me. They look like horizontal lines on the ground. If a room is cluttered, rather than seeing objects in space, I see surfaces which are sometimes on top of each other. I wish I could paint because the world looks to me very much like a canvas with shapes and colors.

    SPIEGEL: To what degree can the mind compensate for the loss of input? In other words, how colorful can a blind person’s world possibly be?

    Sacks: Oh, very colorful! Zoltan Torey for example, an Australian, who was blinded in an industrial accident when he was 21, visualizes things to the point where he shocked his neighbors by replacing the gutters on the roof of his house at night. If you talk to Zoltan, you don’t feel he’s blind. He seems to be looking at you because he visualizes you in a very vivid, detailed manner. However, of course, if you very quietly turn your back at him, he wouldn’t know.

    SPIEGEL: Is it some kind of virtual reality he is creating?

    Sacks: No, he does not form a perceptual world. It doesn’t have, for example, all the details; imagery can never be as rich in detail as reality. Zoltan would go on what information he had. Since he was not blind from birth, he has visual memories that he can call on.

    SPIEGEL: In theory at least, is anyone who becomes blind later in life capable of compensating with more or less detailed imagery?

    Sacks: Not necessarily. John Hull, who corresponds with me by mail, lost his vision when he was in his forties. He describes his state as one of “deep blindness” — a total absence of any imagery. Two years after becoming blind, Hull couldn’t evoke the image of his wife or his children. He said he couldn’t even say which way around the number three went.

    SPIEGEL: Does he miss the images?

    Sacks: No. He even seems to like his condition. He feels he lives in an authentic, autonomous world, in his words one of “concentrated human condition.”

    SPIEGEL: Are you surprised that people’s minds react so differently in comparable circumstances?

    Sacks: Originally, I was very surprised. But, these two, I now realize — and I’ve seen dozens of blind people — are extremes. People adapt in different ways, they come up with all sorts of things. Ten to 15 percent of the people who lose their sight hallucinate — and not just little things, but faces and scenes and animals. Others don’t hallucinate at all.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Is there something like a psychological resilience that makes some people cope better than others?

    Sacks: Well, I mean, Zoltan feels that John Hull was too passive and too acquiescent, to put it bluntly. If you are asking how much of it is a decision to do things and how much is physiology, that’s really a difficult question to answer.

    SPIEGEL: Lillian Kallir, a celebrated musician and one of your patients, lost her ability to read music. Later on, she couldn’t read words anymore or identify objects. What’s different when the mind, and not the eye, loses the ability to see?

    Sacks: When Lillian wrote to me, she was very puzzled. She asked, “How come I can see tiny little letters, and I can’t make sense of them?” This is perception stripped of meaning. You may occasionally experience this yourself. Proust gives an example of this when he wakes up one morning and he doesn’t know where he is or who he is, and he says, “Memory comes down like a rope from heaven.” For Lillian, however, memory doesn’t come back.

    SPIEGEL: How did Lillian describe her experience to you?

    Sacks: The whole visual world was confusing for her. Once she took my medical bag instead of her own purse although they looked totally different. But Lillian stayed calm and found ways of living with this. At home, for example, she organized things by color or by position, so that she could identify them, even though they didn’t carry any visual meaning for her. Also, she still had rough categories for things. I remember showing her a picture of a wolf. She wasn’t able to identify it. But she thought that it maybe was a baby elephant. So she could see it was an animal.

    SPIEGEL: Some of your patients seem to even gain something from their impairments, for example the painter who lost his color vision but found an even stronger aesthetic identity by working in black and white. Can the tragedies you report on ultimately become opportunities for growth?

    Sacks: Well, one wouldn’t wish any of these conditions on anyone, yet there may be a positive side. When the left temporal lobe of the brain gets damaged, people may have a sudden heightened visual facility, and, for example, start painting. People with certain other conditions turn out to be better than normal at reading facial expressions and at hearing expressions of voice. This is not an instantaneous thing. It takes a while to develop. It’s a way to survive and to organize their new world in new ways.

    SPIEGEL: You once compared the brain to an “orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire.” Are the off-key performances of this orchestra more widespread than we think?

    Sacks: I believe that most of us have small frailties and flaws in how we make sense of the world. In fact, there is an impairment which I myself share with a lot of people: I have trouble recognizing faces. It is quite distressing. If you have this condition, you always fear that people might think that you don’t care or that you are not sufficiently attentive. However, the recognition of faces doesn’t depend on attention. It’s pre-attentive. People who are face blind have to learn to pay unusual attention to the way people are dressed, the way they stand, their voice or the way they move.

    SPIEGEL: If you’d meet us five minutes after our conversation in the elevator, would you recognize us?

    Sacks: I probably wouldn’t. Although I noticed you were both tall people, but then — there are lots of tall people (laughs).

    SPIEGEL: Why is it so difficult for the brain to make sense of the visual world?

    Sacks: Because it requires the orchestration of 40 or 50 different areas in the brain. These areas have to do with meaning, with association, emotion and so forth. Fortunately, we are not a blank sheet when we are born. We already have all sorts of potentials, and these have to be developed by experience. I am fascinated, for example, by our ability to read. There is no part of the brain that has been shaped by evolution for reading. Reading has only been around for 5,000 years. The reason why we were able to learn how to read is our inherent potential for shape recognition.

    SPIEGEL: Let’s say we could understand the processes of perception, cognition, language and thinking. Would we then be able to enter the inner world of somebody and put ourselves in somebody else’s mind?

    Sacks: A very primitive thought reading is possible already, with the medical imaging that is available today. If you ask people to imagine a piece of music, to recite a poem internally or to imagine a color, you will find particular parts of the brain light up. However, the more sophisticated thought reading will never become a reality because there’s novelty and uniqueness in everyone. Everyone’s brain develops in a particular way. Even if you could, theoretically, transmit your brain cells to someone else, they wouldn’t know what to make of it.

    SPIEGEL: Why not?

    Sacks: Because the language of uniqueness and subjectivity will never be replaced by the language of physiology. For example, if you think of a certain wonderful moment — when there was that marvelous time when your were 22 and in the love and the moon was rising in a starlit sky — how is this moment imprinted in the brain? We don’t know. Our methods are so crude. There are millions and millions of neurons with tens of thousands of connections to others. The degree of it all is unimaginable. Our medical imagery is getting better and better, but I don’t think that we can ever catch up.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Sacks, we thank you for this interview.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Rafaela von Bredow

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Help for the Disabled: Trained Monkeys Proving Trusty Companions for Those in Need

    Specially-trained Capuchin monkeys in the US are helping physically disabled people with the housework by performing tasks such as removing garbage, fetching the telephone or switching on the microwave. The furry companions are also helping paraplegics cope with loneliness.

    It’s her small hands that make Minnie especially useful. Hairy and slender, with slim fingers and black nails, the Capuchin monkey’s hands are just right for twisting open a bottle of juice or fetching the telephone. And when Craig Cook’s head itches, Minnie comes and scratches it until he feels better.

    “She is more human than you would think,” Cook says. The 44-year-old American, who has been paraplegic for more than 14 years, runs his stiff fingers lovingly through Minnie’s fur as she cuddles on his lap, observing his guest curiously with her large, brown eyes. Then the monkey jumps up and crosses the kitchen of Cook’s bungalow at a wild run, screeching and leaping, a bundle of energy wrapped up in dark brown fur.

    “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Cook says, his eyes shining. He has shared his bungalow here in La Habra, near Los Angeles, with the 30-year-old Capuchin monkey for the past six years. They watch Los Angeles Angels baseball games on TV together, or enjoy the California sun from the patio. And when Cook has “one of those bad days,” it’s Minnie who manages to make him laugh.

    “It’s wonderful to have an animal like that at home,” Cook says. A former engineer and American football quarterback, he broke his spine in a car accident. He’s very lucky to have Minnie — there are only 45 Capuchin monkeys like her in the entire US, and Minnie is one of the best.

    Monkey School

    Minnie spent several years in training at the Monkey College, a facility run by a Boston-based aid organization called Helping Hands. This unusual school trains monkeys as household assistants and life partners for paralyzed people — with great success. “The Capuchin monkeys provide independence and the gift of joy and companionship to the recipients, says Helping Hands employee Andrea Rothfelder. “These animals are very affectionate and loving; a lot of recipients call it a little miracle when their monkey moves in with them.”

    Director of training Alison Payne describes the Monkey College as a “mixture of pre-school and zoo.” Helping Hands has a total of 180 monkeys, 50 of them currently being trained in Boston. Here in the three-story center, the monkeys practice using light switches, drawers, bottles and CD players. They learn the actions first in a room with only Spartan furnishings; later they practice in a “teaching apartment” outfitted with a wheelchair, bed, bookshelf and kitchenette.

    Trainers drill the monkeys on around 30 commands, including “fetch,” for retrieving an object, and “trash,” for taking something to the garbage can. “Push” might mean the monkey should shut the refrigerator door, while “open” would achieve the opposite. Motivation for learning tasks is provided with peanut butter and spray can whipped cream.

    “The monkeys are naturally curious,” Payne says. “We try to expand their attention space.” Still, the monkeys are also allowed some time off. Today Chichi and Jessica are romping around the playroom, chasing bubbles. For their classmate Tricia, it’s bath day. Trainer Jennifer Evans has filled the kitchen sink with a lukewarm bubble bath, where Tricia is splashing about, poking her soaking wet head over the edge. A few minutes later, the trainer comes over to rub her dry.

    “They’re very much like two-year-olds,” Payne says. Actually, the monkeys are between eight and 10, the ideal age range for drilling and training, when they start at the Monkey College. First, they get used to people by living in foster families. Next come two to four years of training. Once they’re housetrained, they can move in with a disabled person.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    When Cook began his life together with Minnie, the evening that ruined his life was already several years behind him. On January 12, 1996, the engineer met a colleague for dinner in Los Angeles. The two left the restaurant shortly before midnight. “It was a mild evening, and Tyler wanted to take a drive in my convertible,” Cook recalls. As they sped down the highway, Cook’s colleague lost control of the 300-horsepower car. The vehicle flipped over and slid down an embankment. Cook’s spine snapped instantly; his colleague was barely hurt.

    Cook lost everything that day — his job; his girlfriend, who soon moved out; but above all control over his own body. Unable to adjust to his new life, he found himself sliding into depression. But when a friend heard of Helping Hands, Cook contacted the organization and sent an application video. A couple of months later, Minnie entered his life.

    “When the trainers came out here, they stayed for about a week,” he recalls. “It was only then that she accepted me as the new king.” That’s the way of Capuchin monkeys — they live in groups and choose their leaders with care.

    Today, Cook and Minnie are inseparable. “Spoon,” Cook says and the monkey fetches one from the silverware drawer. “Sun” — Minnie turns on the light. “Can you do hand?” — Minnie hoists her master’s arm, which has slipped down from the armrest. He uses that hand to operate his wheelchair.

    “Minnie can be lifesaving for me,” Cook says. One time, his wheelchair got stuck on the patio as the sun was going down. Cook knew he was facing an entire night sitting in the dark, freezing and getting wet, until his caregiver arrived in the morning. He called Minnie, who brought his telephone. An hour later, help was there. “I had tears in my eyes,” Cook says.

    “The monkeys can be a lifeline; however, the most important thing of all is the companionship that they bring and this unconditional love,” says director of training Payne. “Suddenly you have this little monkey person at home who just thinks that you are the coolest thing ever.”

    ‘They Alleviate the Pain and the Loneliness’

    Helping Hands employees tell the story of a veteran who lost both his legs in Iraq. “He says that the monkey is the only one who takes him the way he is and who doesn’t notice that he hasn’t any legs,” Rothfelder says. The monkeys could never take the place of a full-time caregiver, “but they allieviate both the pain and the loneliness of being home alone and also provide some tasks in the house.”

    It’s hardly surprising that the clever Capuchin monkeys are in hot demand, but Helping Hands is only able to provide between six and eight of the monkeys to paralyzed individuals each year. It costs the organization around $40,000 (€30,500) to train a single monkey, all of which must come from donations. The service is free for the patients.

    Craig Cook can count himself lucky — his Minnie has granted him a new life. He remembers clearly the moment when the monkey jumped onto his shoulder for the first time, after five months together. “Suddenly she rubbed her fingers through the back of my hair,” he says. “That’s the ultimate sign of affection.”

    Cook estimates Minnie could live another 15 years, but he’s loath to think beyond that point. The monkey won a place in his heart long ago.

    “Minnie, are you OK?” — these are the words he’ll use to call the monkey tonight, after the caregiver has helped him into bed. And Minnie will answer him, from her cage in the living room, where she rolls herself up beneath a small, light blue blanket.

    “And she will go toot toot toot,” Cook says. Then he gives a small smile and explains: “That means, ‘Everything is all right.’”

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Mushroom Clouds and Everpresent Danger: Surviving Cameramen Recall Nuclear Test Shots

    By 1963, the United States had detonated more than 200 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Cameramen and photographers working for a secret special unit recorded the acts of destruction. Some of their sensational images have been declassified, and the last remaining eyewitnesses are now sharing their experiences.

    (-> VIDEO at SPIEGEL ONLINE)

    The atomic missile with the explosive power of 1.5 kilotons of TNT detonated precisely above the heads of the five United States Air Force scientists. At first the men felt only the heat from the explosion. But then the blast wave forced them to their knees.

    George Yoshitake’s camera was clicking the entire time.

    At 7 a.m. on July 19, 1957, the cameraman was standing with a small group of nuclear scientists on the Yucca Flat test site in the state of Nevada. A fighter jet had fired the missile at an altitude of five kilometers (3.1 miles), which was considered a safe distance from the ground. “I was busy behind the cameras,” Yoshitake recalls. “Then I could see the flash go off out of the corner of my eye.” He looked up. “There was this huge, doughnut-shaped cloud up in the sky where the blast when off.”

    The only thing protecting him from the bomb’s fallout was his baseball cap.

    Yoshitake is one of the few people who have stood directly underneath an exploding atom bomb and survived. The American was one of about 40 photographers and cameramen in the 1352nd Photographic Group of the US Air Force. Their mission was top secret. Today Yoshitake, now 82, can finally talk openly about his experiences.

    The special unit’s job was as fascinating as it was dangerous. To film and photograph the American nuclear tests in the Nevada desert and in the South Pacific, the foolhardy men had to place themselves within only a few kilometers of the centers of the explosions.

    Images the Public Never Saw

    Between 1947 and 1969, the material was edited to make more than 6,500 motion pictures in a secret film studio in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, just a few kilometers from the bright lights of Sunset Boulevard. The studio on Wonderland Avenue was called the Lookout Mountain Air Force Station. Using special film and high-speed cameras, cameramen and photographers used the film and photographic footage to artfully produce motion pictures and still photographs.

    “Those men are great guys; they documented a period of time that was both unique and hopefully will never be repeated,” says US documentary filmmaker Peter Kuran, 54, who is working on the story of the “atomic filmmakers.” Kuran wants to preserve the historic film material for posterity. “The photos are the icons of an era,” he says.

    At the height of the Cold War, the superpowers embarked on a spectacular race to develop nuclear weapons. It was accompanied by an unparalleled propaganda war that involved large numbers of tests. By the time the international Treaty banning Nuclear Weapon Tests In The Atmosphere, In Outer Space And Under Water, or Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (NTBT), was signed in 1963, the Americans alone had already detonated more than 200 atomic and hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere. The goal, from the very beginning, was to create impressive images to convince politicians to approve ever-growing military budgets.

    But the public never saw most of the images. “The work these people did was so secretive that nobody even knew who they were for a long time,” says Kuran. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the first photographs and films were declassified, thanks to the documentary filmmaker’s relentless efforts. Kuran traveled throughout the United States, searched through archives and urged the US Department of Energy to release the films and photographs.

    Copies of the material are now stored in gray cardboard boxes in the basement of Kuran’s house in Vancouver, Washington. Nuclear weapons have become a central focus of his life. “When I was 15, I visited Japan with a YMCA (youth) group,” he says. “We happened to be in Hiroshima on the anniversary of the bombing and I saw a film about the destruction of the city. I was the only American in a crowded room full of Japanese. Everyone was looking at me.”

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international

    Kuran felt horrified and ashamed. Initially, he embarked on a career as a developer of special effects for productions like director George Lucas’s “Star Wars” movies. But he couldn’t forget his experience in Japan. More than three decades later, he coincidentally came into contact with those chroniclers of the nuclear tests who were still alive. The nuclear filmmakers were grateful for the attention. “We’re finally getting recognized for some of the work we did,” says Yoshitake. “It was liberating to be able to talk about it.”

    The cameraman now lives in Lompoc, California, about a three-hour drive north of Los Angeles. He is one of the last surviving members of the photographers’ unit. Most of the others died long ago, many of cancer. Yoshitake says he is “more in contact with the widows.”

    From 1955 to 1963, Yoshitake worked for the nuclear weapons test program. “I filmed about 30 explosions,” he reports. “The amazing ones, the most spectacular ones were the hydrogen bombs in the Pacific.” The bombs were usually detonated early in the morning, before dawn, says Yoshitake. “They told us to look away at the initial blast,” he recalls. “For several minutes after the blast, you could see this eerie ultraviolet glow high up in the sky. And I thought that was so spectacular, so meaningful.”

    The images from the Pacific seem almost magical, including the photos of the seven-kilometer fireball created by “Shrimp,” the most powerful bomb the United States ever detonated. On March 1, 1954, a 15-megaton bomb, part of an operation called Castle Bravo, exploded over the Bikini atoll. The destructive power unleashed by the explosion was more than twice as high as the experts had predicted and tore a crater two kilometers in diameter into the island. Within a few minutes, a mushroom cloud rose 40 kilometers into the sky. The entire archipelago was contaminated with radiation and remains uninhabited to this day.

    The cameramen came within about 30 kilometers of the artificial suns in the South Pacific. In the Nevada desert, Yoshitake and his colleagues even came within about eight kilometers of the fireballs. “We could see how the shockwave came rolling across the valley floor,” says Yoshitake. “We hung onto our cameras so we wouldn’t fall over.”

    A few seconds after the explosions, the men also felt the heat from the bombs. The cameraman took it all in stride. “We were young. For me it was a just a job at the time. Only now do I realize how dangerous the work was,” he says.

    For Yoshitake, the work only became unpleasant when it was time to document the effects of the bombs. He shudders when he remembers a test performed in June 1957 under the code name “Priscilla.” Only 30 minutes after the detonation, he had to photograph monkeys, sheep and pigs that had been placed in close proximity to the blast site. “A few of the animals were still alive,” says Yoshitake. The skin on the pigs was charred black, he says, while the eyes of the monkeys had been taped open so that scientists could study the effect of the flash of light on the retina. “The animals were squealing, crying. It smelled of burned flesh. It was just terrible.”

    At least the cameramen wore protective suits on those missions into the center of destruction. But when they confronted the nuclear blasts from afar, they were wearing nothing but shorts and T-shirts. “We had dosimeters that measured our radiation load. That was it,” says Yoshitake’s former colleague, Ken Hackman, 72, who spent months in the Pacific to photograph the tests. He remembers how reckless the military’s behavior was at the time: “After the detonation, B-57 bombers would always fly directly through the mushroom cloud to collect samples. After the planes had landed again, they were decontaminated by men who were only wearing rubber boots as protection.”

    To this day, Hackman sees the bomb tests through the eyes of a photographer. The flash from a nuclear weapon is 10 times as bright as the sun, he says. The photographers had to wear heavily tinted special glasses to prevent burning of the retina. “Everything turns a bright white, and there’s no color at all anymore,” says Hackman. “Once the initial brightness is away, it really is very beautiful to look at.” He has vivid memories of a working trip to Hawaii, where he stood on a volcano and photographed the colorful aurora of an exploding hydrogen bomb. The play of lights in the sky was caused by the strong magnetic field generated by the detonation.

    Capturing the Blast

    The photographers tried out almost every camera model available at the time and tested completely new photographic techniques. Automatic cameras were placed a few hundred meters from the point of explosion, with thick lead shields protecting the film material from gamma radiation. The most advanced film cameras of the day were capable of recording 15 million images per second. The filmmakers even experimented with 3-D photography.

    The US company EG&G was the main source of the inventions. One of the founders of EG&G was Harold Edgerton, who later became world-famous for his photographs of bursting drops of milk. For the nuclear weapons test program, the engineers at EG&G developed a special film with three coatings, each with a different level of sensitivity. The so-called XR film made it possible to photograph the detonations with a single high-speed camera, despite tremendous fluctuations in light intensity.

    The XR film enabled the photographers to capture the power of the weapons in brilliant orange, yellow and red tones, creating highly alienating images of “psychedelic quality,” says Kuran. The US space agency, NASA, later used the technology to photograph its moon missions.

    Eventually the EG&G engineers even managed to capture the first microseconds of atomic explosions on film, using the “Rapatronic,” a camera developed specifically for this purpose. Because a mechanical shutter would have been much too slow, the device had an electronic “light valve” made of polarized special glass, which could be rendered translucent by means of an electric pulse.

    The engineers placed up to 16 of these high-tech cameras near the point of explosion, which allowed them to capture the birth of the atomic hellfire, so to speak. The bubble-like nuclear blast images almost look like living creatures in the photos. The billowing formations of heat and radiation, at temperatures of up to 10 million degrees Celsius, resemble oddly shaped amoeba.

    The Dichotemy Between Destruction and Beauty

    Most of these images are still under lock and key today. Only military physicists are permitted to analyze the images for the purpose of improving the designs of bombs. The US government is still hesitant to release the photos and films completely. But it is critical, says Kuran, that the material be processed and digitized, “before it turns to dust.”

    He has already assembled five documentaries from the film and photographic footage, which he distributes through his website. A sixth film, about the neutron bomb, is in the works. “My goal is to present as realistic an impression as possible of the power of these weapons, but I’m also fascinated by this bizarre dichotemy, how destructive they were and how beautiful they were,” says Kuran.

    The filmmaker hopes that his work will serve as a warning against nuclear testing. But the work has also taught him a surprising lesson. “Personally, I have less fear of nuclear weapons than I used to have,” says the documentary filmmaker. “Now I know that if somebody exploded a big hydrogen bomb 30 kilometers away from me, chances are I will probably survive.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging

    Brooke Greenberg is almost 18, but she has remained mentally and physically at the level of a toddler. An American physician is trying to uncover the child’s secret. He wants to give mankind the gift of eternal life.

    By Philip Bethge

    It is possible that the key to immortality is hidden in this delicate girl, who is only about 76 centimeters (2 feet, 6 inches) tall and weighs seven kilograms (15.4 pounds). Her arms and legs are as fragile as the branches of a young tree. Her laugh sounds like the whimper of a puppy; she has hazel eyes. And when Brooke Greenberg wants her mother she stretches out her tiny arms, shakes her head slowly, and twists her face into a lopsided moue.

    “Come here, Brooke, yes, you are a pretty girl.” Melanie Greenberg, 49, picks up the fragile looking child and gently strokes her back. “She loves being held,” says Greenberg, a mother of four. Brooke’s sisters are named Emily, Caitlin and Carly. Brooke is the second youngest. She will be 18 in January.

    Other girls her age are driving, going out dancing and sleeping with their first boyfriends. But for Brooke it’s as if time had stood still. Mentally and physically, the girl remains at the level of an 11-month-old baby.

    “Brooke is a miracle,” says her father, Howard Greenberg. “Brooke is a mystery,” says Lawrence Pakula, her pediatrician. “Brooke is an opportunity,” says Richard Walker, a geneticist with the University of South Florida College of Medicine. They all mean the girl from Reisterstown, a small town in the US state of Maryland, who may hold the answer to a human mystery. At issue is nothing less than immortality: Brooke Greenberg apparently isn’t aging.

    She has no hormonal problems, and her chromosomes seem normal. But her development is proceeding “extremely slowly,” says Walker. If scientists can figure out what is causing the disorder, it might be possible to unlock the mysteries of aging itself. “Then we’ve got the golden ring,” says Walker.

    He hopes to simply eliminate age-related diseases like cancer, dementia and diabetes. People who no longer age will no longer get sick, he reasons. But he also thinks eternal life is conceivable. “Biological immortality is possible,” says Walker. “If you don’t get hit by a car or by lightning, you could live at least 1,000 years.”

    An Unprecedented Case

    Brooke Greenberg was born prematurely on Jan. 8, 1993 at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. She weighed only 1,800 grams (about four pounds) at birth. It soon became clear that she wasn’t normal. Almost all of her organ systems were altered. Her hips were dislocated, so that her legs pointed awkwardly toward her shoulders. She’d hardly been born before she was placed in a cast.

    The first six years were torture for Brooke and her parents. On one occasion, seven holes in the child’s abdominal wall had to be repaired. Because food kept entering her windpipe instead of her stomach, a gastric feeding tube had to be inserted. She fell into a 14-day coma when she was four. Then doctors diagnosed a brain tumor (the diagnosis later proved to be incorrect). “The Greenbergs had gone out already and made the preparations, buying a coffin and talking to the rabbi,” pediatrician Pakula recalls.

    Pakula practices in a medical building near the Greenbergs’ house. He wears a tie adorned with cartoonish hippopotamuses. A tall stack of paper — Brooke’s file — sits on his desk. “This can’t be lost,” says the doctor, placing his hand on the documents. He knows what a treasure the file represents.

    The most surprising thing about Brooke is that she hardly ages at all. Her body stopped growing when she was two years old. She hasn’t grown a centimeter or gained a pound. Pakula injected the girl with growth hormones, but nothing happened. He studied the medical literature and consulted specialists worldwide. “She was presented to everybody who was anybody in the medical world at the time,” says the 77-year-old pediatrician, “but she didn’t match anything any physician had seen before.”

    The Greenbergs waited and hoped — one year, two years, 10 years — but nothing happened. Their daughter’s facial features have remained unchanged. There are no signs of puberty. “Brooke’s nurses, her teachers, even her father can’t consistently sort photos of her chronologically,” says Pakula. Only the girl’s hair and fingernails are growing normally.

    ‘She’s a Miracle’

    At the family’s house in Reisterstown, Howard Greenberg points to photos on the walls: Brooke at three, next to her one-year-old sister Carly, who was already bigger than she was at the time; Brooke in a playsuit on her 12th birthday; Brooke at 14, at her Bat Mitzvah, the Jewish rite of initiation.

    Greenberg hurries from picture to picture. Brooke looks the same in all the photos. Her mouth is always slightly lopsided and her eyes just a tough too far apart. “She’s a miracle.” It’s something that has to be said, again and again. “What’s she missing in life? Nothing. She hasn’t got a worry in the world. She isn’t broken. We’re the ones who are broken.” This is the father’s way of explaining away his daughter’s condition. “If you look at it that way, it makes it much more bearable,” he says later on.

    At first Melanie Greenberg took care of Brooke on her own, but now she has help. Feeding Brooke through the tube takes 10 hours a day. She goes to a school for disabled children from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Much of the rest of the time she spends in her room, sitting in her bed and watching television, or bobbing back and forth in her light-blue baby swing.

    “She can do this all day,” says Melanie Greenberg, lifting her daughter into the air and carefully placing her on her thin little legs, with her feet twisted inward. “It was not easy, it was very hard,” she says, “but I’m sure there is a reason for Brooke to be here. Something is in her, something that could help millions of people.The Disassociated Body

    Richard Walker, a retired professor of medicine and specialist in the biology of aging, lives in a house on a lagoon in the coastal town of Indian Rocks, Florida. He became aware of Brooke Greenberg in 2005. “I thought right away that she had a unique mutation in key genes that control development and aging,” he says. Walker contacted the Greenbergs and convinced the father to let him take a sample of Brooke’s blood so that he could study her genetic makeup. He examined the number and condition of the chromosomes. He analyzed the so-called telomeres at the ends of chromosomes, the length of which provides information about the age of cells. He filled tiny reagent reservoirs made of biochips with pieces of genetic material, and tested the activity of a wide range of genes.

    The results are as sobering as they are fascinating. “We haven’t found anything unusual so far,” says Walker, “but that wasn’t a disappointment; it was actually an incentive to keep on searching.”

    The girl’s uniqueness lies precisely in the fact that her genetic material seems normal, whereas she is obviously not normal, says the professor. Despite the surprisingly unremarkable genetic analysis, complete chaos prevails inside the girl’s body.

    Her brain is hardly more developed than an infant’s, but her bones have a biological age of about 10 years. Her teeth, including her baby teeth, are like those of an eight-year-old. The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age. In addition, the development of various organ systems, like the digestive tract, is what the professor calls “disassociated.”

    “Different parts of her body are developing at different rates, as if they were not a unit but parts of separate organisms,” Walker explains. He believes that there is only one explanation — a failure of central control genes.

    Normally, a carefully orchestrated genetic program allows a tiny egg cell to grow into an adult body. But if this master plan is impaired, the marvel of growth goes awry. Walker believes that this is precisely what has happened with Brooke. Genes that play an important role in physical development are either inactive or defective. “If we identify those genes, we might be able to understand the development and subsequently the aging of the body,” says the scientist.

    An Eccentric Theory

    Walker believes that aging is merely the continuation of the body’s development. He uses the image of a house to illustrate his point. First the house is built. When it’s finished — or, in the case of the body, when sexual maturity is reached — the construction crew would normally leave the site. But in normal people the construction workers stay and keep building, according to a plan that’s been fulfilled and a construction supervisor who says nothing but nonsense. Soon the crew builds things like contorted bay windows and shaky dormers. Supporting beams are suddenly sawed off, and then walls start falling. Finally the building collapses completely — and death catches up with the body.

    “Aging happens when developmental genes merely run out of meaningful information and subsequently cause chaos,” Walker says. His idea is to simply shut off the master genes of development. This, he hopes, will put a stop to the aging process. If Walker is right, the consequences will be dramatic. A body manipulated in this fashion would no longer change, but would only perform repair work. Eternal life would be within reach.

    All this talk has exhausted the professor. He sits in his heavy armchair and gazes out at the glittering water. A dinghy and a motorboat are tied to his private jetty directly in front of the deck, and a surfboard is lying nearby. The doctor sails, surfs and skis. He is 71. He loves his life.

    Does he want to be immortal?

    “Of course I want to live forever,” he says. “I could study mathematics; I could learn so many more things. It would be the greatest gift in the world.” Many people, says Walker, imagine that eternal life would be nothing but hardship and senescence. “But that’s not how it would be,” says Walker. Ideally development would be arrested just after a person reaches sexual maturity.

    And the social consequences? Who would be allowed to live forever, and who wouldn’t? Who would be allowed to have children?

    Walker hesitates. “These are ethical questions, not scientific questions,” he says. “These would be arguments made by philosophers and priests.”

    ‘Highly Unlikely’

    Walker’s theories are controversial. The British biologist Aubrey de Grey, for example, holds his American colleague in high esteem, but believes that aging and development are not related. The Brooke Greenberg case, says de Grey, has “absolutely nothing to do with aging.” He points to the phase of life between the ages of 20 and 40, in which the body hardly changes at all. “Is it likely that the developmental gene expression suddenly stops during this time and then starts up again? No, this is highly unlikely,” he says.

    De Grey favors the standard theory that the body’s cells simply wear out over the years, and that they accumulate toxins and lose their ability to regenerate. He has identified seven causes of death, like cell loss or changes in genetic material, which he hopes to combat with stem-cell therapy or special injections.

    But Walker doesn’t challenge the criticism. “The deterioration of the body’s cells is precisely a consequence of the unregulated activity of development genes,” he argues. His theory is seductive in a sense. While biologists like de Grey tamper with the countless symptoms of growing old, Walker simply wants to do away with aging altogether.

    “Imagine we could stop the degenerative changes of the body,” he says enthusiastically. “The onset of age-related diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia and many forms of cancer could be prevented.”

    To prove his theory, Walker needs people like Brooke Greenberg, in whom the developmental master genes fail. He’s already discovered two similar cases. Six-year-old Gabrielle K., from Billings, Montana, born Oct. 15, 2004, also doesn’t seem to be aging much at all. At the same time her chromosomes, just like Brooke Greenberg’s, seem completely normal.

    Nicky Freeman, a 40-year-man who seems to be trapped in a boy’s body, lives in Esperance in Western Australia. His biological age is estimated at 10 years.

    All in the Genes

    Can Gabrielle or Nicky point the way to the fountain of youth? Walker doesn’t know yet. He is focusing his attention on Brooke at the moment. He wants to sequence the girl’s entire DNA, together with experts from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. If they find mutations in Brooke’s genetic makeup, Walker plans to identify the corresponding genes in laboratory rats and then block them. He reasons that if the genetically manipulated remain young, researchers will in fact have put a stop to their development.

    “Brooke holds the key to everything,” says Walker. He’s anxious to press on with his work, because he feels that his time is running out. But Howard Greenberg is stalling. He has long felt that he is protecting a valuable treasure in his red brick house. He’s even hired lawyers to examine the issue of the rights to Brooke’s genome. The father knows time is on his side. Doctors tell him that with good medical care his daughter can live a long time.

    In the Greenberg home, Melanie has now attached a bag containing a complete nutritional formula to her daughter’s feeding tube. The brownish flood runs through a tube into Brooke’s small body.

    Howard Greenberg looks down at his daughter. Wearing a red-and-white striped T-shirt and white pants, the girl rocks back and forth in his baby swing, as monotonously as a pendulum.

    “I always thought she would die way before me, but I don’t think that anymore,” says the 53-year-old after a pause. “Brooke can live forever. She’ll always be here.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    (—> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

  • Jump-Starting the E-Car Revolution: New Mercedes Has Tesla Technology Under the Hood

    Mercedes and Toyota are bringing new electric cars onto the market that rely on technology from the Californian automaker Tesla. The startup company, whose sports cars already have a cult following in Hollywood, has pioneered the use of laptop batteries in electric autos.

    Experts considered the idea of using laptop computer batteries to power a car laughable at best — until the car turned out to actually work, sending shock waves through the industry.

    Tesla, a Silicon Valley startup company, first presented its whimsically designed electric sports car in the summer of 2006. The car body was made by Lotus and power for the engine came from 6,831 standard small batteries, bundled together into a high-voltage packet that allowed the car the same bursts of speed as a Porsche.

    Now, the same construction has caught on at both Toyota and Daimler, two of the world’s most famous car manufacturers. Both companies hold shares in Tesla and buy batteries and control technology from the Californian startup for small production runs of passenger cars.

    Mercedes-Benz will start production this fall on a series of 500 cars in an electric version of its A-Class. The car floor contains two rechargeable Tesla batteries, each constructed from 1,960 individual batteries. These provide the vehicle with enough power to reach speeds of 150 kph (95 mph). The car has a range of about 200 kilometers (125 miles) on a single charge, if driven at a moderate pace.

    It seems surprising that Daimler would really need Tesla to accomplish this, …. More