Blog

“Humans never learn from history.” This sentence needs to be supplemented as — Humans never learn from history, nor from other countries’ lessons. Why? — Arrogance!

When China first implemented lockdown in Wuhan, western media came to bash “It is against human rights.” NY times published an article “Only Democracy can treat COVID-19.” (Check my previous blogs.”) In U.S., politicians tired to downplay and claimed ” COVID-19 is similar as flu. No worries.” However, along with the increasing numbers of confirmed cases and death rates in Europe and U.S., western countries finally recognized the importance. But, they’ve lost a key period to prepare for the outbreak. For example, in U.S., did they prepare enough testing kits? Did they train medical staff to handle the potential and confirmed patients? Did they make decisions about supporting costs of testing and treatment? The answer is no!

In U.S., politicians kept contradicting with Scientists and doctors. Public are panicking and lack formal instruction. What a failed leadership and worst risk management! Evidence-based policy making becomes a joke. Editors of Lancet and Science came out to guard science. I wish the Scientific voice will be stronger and more influential. I really wish……

I learnt this term today. Simply put, 60% of the total population will get infected by the virus, in doing so, hopefully most people gain immunity against this virus. Frankly speaking, the infirm and old will die from it. Young and strong may recover from it and are immune from the virus attack. This is the most irresponsible and unethical method to contain COVID-19. Herd immunity is used when there is vaccine. But we don’t have vaccine for COVID-19 till now.

First, COVID-19 is such a new virus that our doctors and scientists know little about it. No one can ensure young and strong will mostly recover from it. How about there is sequela after infection? As it is RNA virus, it is highly mutable. We can’t ensure the virus will not gain virulence during its mutation. We can’t make sure people can be immune from the virus resurgence.

Second, as China and South Korea have proved the strict containment is effective, method like herd immunity is the worst decision ever made. It is like a gambling, putting many lives into risk. It is the excuse of an incompetent government.

Third, measures like herd immunity will be the retrogress of humanity and civilization. Giving up your beloved ones is heartbreaking, no matter it sounds how “scientific”.

Be proactive! Act quickly and decisively, please!

In the coming decades, human kind will have to, no matter we want or not, embrace more and more artificial intelligence. It is actually some algorithms, but it can control the robots or machines to perform complex tasks. Some people have already begun to worry that AI will be stronger than their human creators, so humans will be killed by AI. Optimists said, “Well, we can write such codes: ‘Don’t kill people.’ to control AI’s behaviours.”

AI is already on the way. I can hear her steps. Once she knocks the door, many people will lose their jobs, because AI can handle their jobs much better. Today, Chinese doctors have published their AI-aided technology to read COVID-19 CT scan and make a diagnosis within 90 seconds. It is much faster than an experienced radiologist who uses an average of 20 mins to give their judgement. AI can even train themselves to learn more knowledge in a very short time. People will be freed from labor, then do what? Will humanity still evolve? How will humans’ tool-making skills develop at then?

Today, WHO declares COVID-19 as a pandemic. In the past two months, it was called outbreak and epidemic. During today’s lab meeting, my supervisor suggested us to work from home and minimized public appearance.

I never felt my life is so valuable as this moment. Keeping healthy is one’s best contribution to the world. Medical resources, facial masks, hand sanitizer, disinfection gels may be more precious than designer clothes. Money can’t garantee a medical care chance. Due to overloaded hospital capacity, Italy implemented war-time triage medics deciding who lives, who dies and who gets access to the limiting number of ICU beds. An even worse news is this is just beginning and the disease has a long life.

I pay my tribute to medical staff who are fighting at the front-line. In China, doctors and nurses from other regions went to support Wuhan hospitals, the epicentre of COVID-19 in China. I read a story that, a former nurse in Italy, now a full-time mother, decided to go back to hospital to fight with the virus.

Science and humanity are two factors driving human progress. While the researchers are working around the clock to develop the vaccines and treatments, showing compassion, pity and love are the only virtues that common people can do.

I will try to stay positive.

Today, I found a bioinformatic job that I have been running for four days is a total failure. I have sensed something wrong at the beginning and even during the procedure, but I did not dig up the reasons. So I ended up wasting four days.

What I learned from this failure? Details and patience. I should have spent more time thinking about the whole procedure, rather than hurried up to run the job. I should have a general idea about the formulas and principles behind the bioinformatics tools. Then I need to evaluate whether it is adaptable to my data. Running the tools is really the last thing that I need to concern about.

“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.” This sentence describes my feeling exactly at this moment. Pandemic spreads, stock market plunges, panic increases …… From historical perspective, it seems nothing new, because history always repeats itself. But for every single person, can we overcome the risks and even grasp the opportunity to be a better version of oursevles?

Art has long been regarded as a kind of education, to improve beauty, truth and wisdom of humanity. Art is also used as propaganda to promote religion of political views. Modern artists reject these purposes. They advocate “L’art pour l’art”, and try to avoid instilling special meaning into the art.

I am not a fan of art with religious or political propaganda. I feel like someone tries to rob my rights of independent thinking. I also lack insights towards art depicting evil or ugly objects.

I prefer the art which simply deliver the beauty, wisdom, truth, and love. It may be a landscape painting describing a mountainous scene in 18 contrary, a sculpture displaying a toned body, or a movie fullfilling the love of humanity.

I hope art can enrich and uplift my mind. As a scientific scholar, I hope my limited time with art is kind a pleasure and relaxation which can drag me out of abstract concepts full of numbers and codes.

Continuing my last post, I would like to emphasize the importance of tolerating and even accepting opinions different from our own.

The common aim of scientific researchers is to contribute to knowledge about nature. Conclusions from scientific research may be imperfect or limited due to the constrained environmental conditions. These conclusions need to be further proved and finalized. Researchers need to absorb experience from other studies and optimize their own experimental process. One important part of a research article is the comparison with previous studies. Through comparisons, we can identify the weakness and strength of our studies, thus promoting the realization.

Most reserachers don’t build from scratch. We stand “on the shoulders of giants”. The knowledge sifted by wisdom of time finally becomes truth. At the mean time, messages from our peers are of great importance, especially those different from our own. We don’t rank winners or losers in scientific research. Even a failed study can provide lessons for us to learn from. Rejection to other opinions will prevent chances of making progress.

In short, value opinions different from our own.

First of all, hats off to the German philosopher Georg Hegel.

Scientific research requires us to observe and analyze the natural world in a rational process. We come to the conclusion with sound evidence. So why do we get different conclusions towards a same phenomena most of time? The reasons rest upon multiple aspects: sampling strategies, investigation methods, statistics methods, and even the researchers — their work ethics and their knowledge background.

These different opinions may not be the truth, but they are valuable resources for us to mine the truth. Both opinions may contain some facts as well as exaggeration and distortion. We need to synthesize these facts so that we may come close to the truth finally.

Taken together, respect opinions different from our own. What your opponents have may be just what you need.

Take a break from CoronaVirus. Let’s concentrate on another pressing concern, however, only few people have realize it. The rising sea level has caused the land loss. The once beautiful trees have become “skeletons of giants reaching for the sky”. “It is already happening , and happening really fast on the coastal plain of North Carolina.” The salt and other ions kill the trees and crops. Many sea coastal areas suffer from the similar problem.

The land loss implemented a series of influence on biodiversity, carbon sequestration, crop production. People have tried to plant wetland trees to save the land. But frequent drought and climate change complicate the research on the nutrients of these experimental lands.

In the face of these pressing concerns, I resort to German philosopher Hegel for reassurance. He showed sanguine attitude towards history. He encouraged us, “Don’t give up hope even in dark periods. Progress is not linear, but does occur.” Well, did he predict climate change back then?