IN CONVERSATION FEATURE FEATURE ARTICLE Childhood well-being – p.11 Healthy oceans – p.23 The secret of our success –p.33 Circles in the sky – p.41

IDEAS TO CHANGE THE WORLD—SPRING 2016

THE MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS Exploring the question of human consciousness – p.15 President’s message Promoting excellence now and in the future

The breadth and the depth of research being The Secret of Our Success, which suggests that it’s carried out by CIFAR fellows is truly impressive not our overall intelligence, but our ability to learn – from the action of tiny particles in fractions of from one another, that has led to human success. a second, to the behaviour of the universe over Finally, I want to point out the conversation billions of years. From the effects of stress on a among three of our fellows – Megan Gunnar, child, to the development of entire societies and Charles Nelson and Michael Kobor. They discuss the institutions that make them work. what research has taught us about the importance Fascinating as CIFAR research is, it’s not of early experience to the well-being of children, undertaken merely out of curiosity. When we’re what questions still need answered, and how our deciding on what programs to bring together, research findings can be translated into policy and we ask ourselves a few simple questions. Is the practice that actually help vulnerable children. question important? Can answering it make The conversation is especially interesting a real and enduring difference? Will CIFAR’s because the issues it raises will be addressed in involvement make a difference? November by the CIFAR Forum on the Well- Only when we can answer yes to all of these Being of the World’s Children in London, questions do we decide to put together a pro- England. In the forum, CIFAR will bring to- gram of research. It’s an approach that has led gether more than a hundred researchers, prac- to amazing successes. You’ll read about a few of titioners, organizations and other stakeholders them in this issue of Reach magazine, in which to discuss what research questions need to be we highlight some of our many pre-eminent re- answered to help us help children. It’s a massive searchers and the important work they are doing. effort by CIFAR to tap into the expertise of an en- In our cover feature, you’ll read about how tire community, and it’s one we think will play an researchers in our Azrieli Program in Brain, important role in setting new research directions. Mind & Consciousness are using the latest I’d also like to take the opportunity to men- tools of science and philosophy to tackle the tion that we are launching the CIFAR Azrieli puzzling questions raised by consciousness – Global Scholars program. This new program what is it, exactly? What is it good for? Where will provide young researchers with oppor- does it come from, and how do we recognize if tunities to develop the cross-disciplinary and someone or something has it? Those questions cross-sector knowledge, skills and perspec- are interesting in themselves, but they also have tives they need to become research leaders important implications for our understanding within academia and agents of change beyond of basic human psychology, cognitive function academia. The program is just launching, but and mental health. It’s exactly the sort of re- please go to cifar.ca to read about it and other search problem that CIFAR’s interdisciplinary developments at CIFAR. approach is intended to solve. I hope you enjoy this issue of Reach maga- You’ll also see how the fellows in our In- zine. It tells some of our stories, but there are tegrated Microbial Biodiversity program are many more than we can fit into its pages. I’d tackling fundamental questions about the in- encourage you to go to our new IdeasExchange credible diversity of microbial life in the oceans website, cifar.ca/ideasexchange, to keep up on that have major implications for the health of all of our news. • coral reefs, the oceans and our world’s climate. And you’ll read about Joe Henrich’s new book Alan Bernstein, President & CEO

1 CONTENTS

4 Advances News from our research networks.

11 Childhood well-being In advance of the CIFAR Forum on the Well-Being of the World’s Children, three Child & Brain Development fellows talk about what we know, and what we still have to learn, about early childhood and well-being. 15 15 The mystery of consciousness What is consciousness? It’s one of the most perplexing questions in philosophy and brain science. Fellows in CIFAR’s new Azrieli Program in Brain, Mind & Consciousness are using new scientific methods to get to the bottom of it.

23 Healthy oceans

23 New understanding of microbial life could help us heal coral reefs and even give insight into how oceans regulate the world’s climate.

33 The secret of our success Humans aren’t as intelligent as we think we are. Luckily, our knack for social learning lets us create a culture that’s smarter than any of us.

41 Circles in the sky An Escher drawing that mirrors the shape 33 of the universe.

43 IdeasExchange CIFAR’s new IdeasExchange platform connects researchers, change makers and innovators to drive change in society.

45 CIFAR’s donors

47 History note What an experiment filmed by the BBC taught us about identity, social 41 roles and the danger of tyranny.

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Reach Magazine

Spring 2016 —V olume 15, Issue 1

Managing Editor Creative Direction Kurt Kleiner Concrete [email protected] www.concrete.ca

Reach Magazine, CIFAR BN / Registration N° 180 Dundas Street West, Suite 1400 11921 9251 RR0001 Toronto, ON M5G 1Z8

Produced by CIFAR Marketing & Communications

About CIFAR CIFAR creates knowledge that is transforming our world. The Institute brings together out- standing researchers to work in global networks that address some of the most important ques- tions our world faces today. Our research is focused on improving human health, transforming technology, building strong societies and sustaining the Earth. Our networks help support the growth of research leaders and are catalysts for change in business, government and society. Established in 1982, CIFAR is a Canadian-based, global organization, comprised of nearly 350 fellows, scholars and advisors from more than 100 institutions in 16 countries. CIFAR is gener- ously supported by the governments of Canada, British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, Canadian and international partners, as well as individuals, foundations and corporations.

His Excellency The Right Honourable David Johnston (Honorary Patron) Governor General of Canada Ottawa ON

Board of Directors

Barbara Stymiest Lindsay Gordon (Chair, CIFAR) Chancellor Corporate Director University of British Columbia Toronto ON Vancouver BC

Bruce H. Mitchell Anthony R.M. Graham (Vice-Chair, CIFAR) Vice Chairman President & CEO Wittington Investments Limited Permian Industries Limited Toronto ON Toronto ON Jacqueline Koerner Stephen J. Toope Founder and Past Chair (Vice-Chair, CIFAR) Ecotrust Canada Director, Munk School of Global Affairs Vancouver BC University of Toronto Toronto ON Stephen D. Lister Managing Partner Peter J. G. Bentley Imperial Capital Limited Director & Chair Emeritus Toronto ON Canfor Corporation Vancouver BC Patricia Meredith Clarkson Centre for Board Effectiveness Jean-Guy Desjardins University of Toronto Chairman, CEO Toronto ON Fiera Capital Corporation Montreal QC Gilles G. Ouellette Group Head, BMO Wealth Management Jim Dinning BMO Financial Group Chairman Toronto ON Western Financial Group High River AB Lawrence Pentland Corporate Director David A. Dodge Toronto ON Senior Advisor Bennett Jones LLP Hugo F. Sonnenschein Ottawa ON President Emeritus & Distinguished Service Professor Department of Economics University of Chicago Pierre Y. Ducros Chicago IL President P. Ducros & Associates Bill Young Montreal QC Founder and Managing Partner Monitor Clipper Partners Brenda Eaton Boston MA Corporate Director Victoria BC Alan Bernstein President & CEO Morten N. Friis CIFAR Non-Executive Director Toronto ON Cover illustration by Royal Bank of Scotland Adam Simpson. Toronto ON

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Advances News highlights from our research networks

ARTHUR McDONALD RECEIVES THE NOBEL PRIZE

Arthur B. McDonald (Queen’s University), associate fellow in CIFAR’s Cosmology & Gravity program, received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery that neutri- nos change identities, a finding which shows that these sub- atomic particles have mass. He Deep Genomics combines deep learning with genome science. Photo: Image courtesy of Science shares the prize with Takaaki Kajita of Japan. McDonald led a research seemed to be disappearing. group, including Senior Fellow McDonald’s group discovered CIFAR FELLOW LAUNCHES Mark Chen (Queen’s Univer- that SNO was in fact captur- DEEP GENOMICS sity), at the Sudbury Neutrino ing the neutrinos, but that Observatory (SNO), studying the missing ones had actual- Senior Fellow Brendan Frey neutrinos formed through nu- ly changed ‘identities’ during (University of Toronto) launch- clear reactions in the sun. As their trip from the sun – chang- ed a startup company, Deep these tiny particles travelled ing from one to another of Genomics, which will develop to Earth, two-thirds of them three different types of neutri- technology to predict how no. Not only did the discovery changes in our genome affect explain the missing neutrinos, human biology and health. it also implied that neutri- The company is using tech- nos actually have mass. This nology based on an artificial finding challenged the Stan- intelligence approach called dard Model of particle physics, deep learning, which CIFAR changing our understanding of fellows in the Learning in one of the most abundant par- Machines & Brains program ticles in the universe. have pioneered. Frey, who is McDonald has been in- appointed to this program and volved with CIFAR for 18 years, also to CIFAR’s program in previously as the Cosmology Genetic Networks, has com- & Gravity program’s advisory bined deep learning with new committee chair and as a mem- technologies for reading and Arthur B. McDonald won the Nobel Prize. ber of the Research Council. writing DNA code in living

4 ADVANCES

organisms. One of the compa- dard vehicle without modifying nism that causes the infertility. ny’s goals is to understand how the engine, and when burned They have also identified a po- mutations in our genomes af- it releases less carbon dioxide tential target for treatment. The fect susceptibility to disease. into the atmosphere than stan- research was conducted in rats. Deep Genomics’ first prod- dard gasoline does. However, it Kaufer, who is in CIFAR’s uct, called SPIDEX, provides is currently expensive and diffi- Child & Brain Development information about how hun- cult to produce. program, worked with UC dreds of millions of DNA In the second system, sunlight Berkeley colleagues Anna Ger- mutations may alter splicing and nickel sulfide nanoparticles aghty, Sandra Muroy, Lance in the cell, a process that is cru- split the hydrogen from water Kriegsfeld and George Bentley.

cial for normal development. (H2O). Then a microbe called Their findings show the impor- Aberrent splicing is behind Methanosarcina barkeri takes tant role of a neural peptide that many diseases and disorders, in the hydrogen and carbon controls a number of functions

including cancers and autism dioxide (CO2) and produc- related to fertility.The peptide, spectrum disorder, so SPIDEX es methane (CH4). Renewable called RFRP3, is expressed at has immediate and practical methane is useful – methane is high levels prior to puberty, importance for genetic testing the main component of natural and falls when sexual develop- and pharmaceutical develop- gas. But Yang hopes to improve ment begins. The researchers ment. The science validating the approach and produce even induced stress in female rats by the SPIDEX tool has been de- more complex chemical com- restricting their movements, re- scribed in the journal Science. pounds in the future. sulting in high levels of RFRP3 expression, and then letting them recover. Even long after recovery, the rats’ RFRP3 lev- ARTIFICIAL GENETIC SWITCH els remained high, and they PHOTOSYNTHESIS CONTROLS STRESS- were less likely to mate, less like- CREATES FUEL FROM INDUCED INFERTILITY ly to become pregnant if they SUNLIGHT AND WATER did mate, and more likely to Chronic stress has long been lose some embryos if they did Inspired by photosynthesis in known to reduce fertility. become pregnant. The research- plants, scientists have built two CIFAR Fellow Daniela Kaufer ers could also reverse the effect systems that use sunlight and (University of California, Berke- by injecting a genetically engi- water to produce fuel – buta- ley) and her colleagues have neered virus to turn off the gene nol and methane, respectively. un-covered the molecular mecha- that produces RFRP3. Materials scientist Peidong Yang (University of Califor- nia, Berkeley), a senior fellow in CIFAR’s program in Bio- inspired Solar Energy, has been developing the concept behind these systems with his collabo- rators for more than a decade. The first system produces chemicals such as butanol by using semi-conducting nano- wires to harvest sunlight and turn it into electrons, then feeding the electrons to bac- teria that produce acetate and feeding the acetate in turn to synthetically engineered E. coli. Butanol can be used in a stan- Daniela Kaufer explores the link between stress and infertility.

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Kaufer says the findings could point to a treatment for stress-induced infertility in hu- mans. The gene and the RFRP3 peptide could be useful targets for a drug.

FAST RADIO BURST HINTS AT ITS SOURCE

Scientists have detected a burst of radio waves from six bil- Malaria parasites bursting from red blood cells. Photo: Shutterstock lion light years away, one of a handful they’ve discovered in just got co-opted into be- the past decade – and this time FROM SYMBIONT ing used for parasitism,” says they have clues about its source. TO PARASITE Keeling, director of CIFAR’s CIFAR Global Scholar Alum- program in Integrated Micro- nus Kiyoshi Masui (University The group of parasites that bial Biodiversity. The results, of British Columbia) is the lead cause malaria and toxoplas- which contradict existing text- author of a paper, published in mosis were once algae, living book theories about the origin Nature, that details the remark- in symbiosis with other organ- of parasitism, were published able findings. Masui worked isms. Researchers have found in Proceedings of the National with a team including Ue-Li Pen that these ancestors, called api- Academy of Sciences (PNAS). (University of Toronto), a senior complexans, had all the genetic fellow in CIFAR’s Cosmology tools they needed to evolve from & Gravity program; and Jon- symbiont to parasite – from athan Sievers (University of friend to foe – all along. PARENTS PROTECT KwaZulu-Natal). They analyzed Apicomplexans use spores YOUNGER CHILDREN, BUT 700 hours of archival data from to latch onto cells in the host, NOT TEENS, FROM STRESS the National Science Founda- then reproduce once inside. tion’s Green Bank Telescope. This may seem like quintes- A parent’s presence helps young- They discovered the burst sential parasite behaviour, but er children reduce or prevent the and found that the region of it isn’t, according to Senior activation of the powerful stress space it came from was high- Fellow Patrick Keeling (Univer- hormone cortisol in difficult sit- ly magnetized, suggesting that sity of British Columbia). They uations, according to research by the burst could be related to a don’t harm the host; the two Megan R. Gunnar (University recently exploded star – a su- live together in a mutually ben- of Minnesota), an associate fel- pernova – or to the gas cloud eficial relationship. low in CIFAR’s Child & Brain inside of a nebula forming new Keeling and his team se- Development program. How- stars. Another possibility is quenced parts of the genomes ever, by the time children are that it came from the dense in- of several benign apicomplexan teenagers, the presence of a par- ner regions of its host galaxy. relatives and compared them ent has little or no influence. The finding advances our with the parasite. They found The parental role as a buffer limited knowledge of fast radio that all of the genes linked with against stress hormones is im- bursts (FRBs), which last only a parasitism exist in the friend- portant; it helps kids when they split second but carry more en- lier relatives too, and it was a are in stressful situations such ergy than our sun emits over a fairly small and subtle change as going to a new school or per- few months. Scientists have that gave rise to the parasite. forming in public. Until now, puzzled over FRBs since they “The whole system exist- it was unclear how far into were discovered 10 years ago. ed long before parasitism. It childhood the effect would last.

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Work by CIFAR fellows helped detect gravitational waves for the first time. Photo: Courtesy of SXS/CITA/SciNet

Gunnar’s team used a stress- a large network of friends did ful public speaking test on two GROUP MEMBERSHIPS not predict self-esteem, but be- groups of children, aged nine to BOOST SELF-ESTEEM MORE longing to multiple groups did. 10 and aged 15 to 16. The chil- THAN FRIENDS ALONE The authors argue that groups dren prepared with the help of provide benefits that interper- either a parent or a stranger. In Belonging to multiple groups sonal ties alone do not, such the younger children, cortisol that are important to you as meaning, connection, sup- levels in the saliva were not ele- boosts self-esteem much more port and a sense of control over vated when they prepared with than having friends alone, new one’s life. their parent, although these research has found. This new study could signal a kids still said they were anxious The researchers worked with shift away from thinking about while they gave their speeches. groups of school children, the self-esteem as something that For the older group, the par- elderly and formerly homeless comes solely from inside of us. ents were no more helpful than people in the UK, China and Research on groups is a major the strangers for relieving stress. Australia, and found that those theme in CIFAR’s Social Inter- It’s possible that for teens, who belonged to many groups, actions, Identity & Well-Being peers play a more important buf- whatever their nature, consis- program. The paper was pub- fer role than parents do. If so, tently had higher self-esteem. lished in PLOS ONE. that would have implications for However, this was apparent teenagers who fail to establish only when people felt that the close peer relationships. groups in question contribut- ed to their sense of who they GRAVITATIONAL WAVES were – that is, when they were DETECTED a basis for social identity. CIFAR Fellows Nyla Brans- Physicists have detected gravi- combe (University of Kansas), tational waves left over from Alexander Haslam and Cathe- the collision of two black holes rine Haslam (both University of more than a billion years ago, Queensland) collaborated with and confirmed a prediction lead author Jolanda Jetten on made by Albert Einstein as part the research, which compared of his general theory of relativity. people’s group memberships CIFAR Fellow Harald Pfei- with the number of friends ffer (University of Toronto) was Megan Gunnar. they had. They found that even part of an international team

7 ADVANCES

called the Laser Interferometer reaction that changes the shape Gravitational-wave Observatory of the protein, enabling the PATIENCE AND PERSISTENCE (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration. rhodopsin to interact with oth- LEAD TO EVIDENCE OF A LIGO detected gravitational er proteins and initiating the QUANTUM SPIN LIQUID waves, which are ripples in the visual-signalling cascade that fabric of spacetime that happen ultimately sends an electrical Physicists have reported the first when massive objects accelerate signal to the brain. evidence that a state of matter in the universe. Teams led by CIFAR Senior called a ‘spin liquid’ exists at a Many decades of theory and Fellows R. J. Dwayne Miller temperature near absolute zero. indirect evidence supported (University of Toronto and The findings may advance a new the existence of gravitational Max Planck Institute for the field of study in modern physics waves, most notably through Structure and Dynamics of and contribute to our under- a technique called pulsar- Matter) and Oliver Ernst (Uni- standing of other states, such as timing used by CIFAR fellows versity of Toronto) used an superconductivity. in the program in Cosmo- advanced type of spectroscopy CIFAR Senior Fellow Takashi logy & Gravity, but this is the to study retinal isomerization Imai (McMaster University) and first direct observation. The re- within bovine rhodopsin. They his student Mingxuan Fu pub- searchers concluded the source found that the process takes lished their findings in Science. of the gravitational waves was place in 30 femtoseconds – 30 Spin is the property of an elec- two black holes orbiting each millionths of a billionth of a tron that determines its magnetic other and pulling together un- second. This appears to repre- behaviour. In certain materials at til they collided and merged sent a molecular speed limit. low temperatures, spins tend to into one. Previously, the best measure- align. But theorists have debat- “It is absolutely stunning to ment suggested that it took ed for decades whether particular see two groundbreaking discov- place in 200 femtoseconds. triangular arrangements of elec- eries at once,” says Pfeiffer, “Not A better understanding trons could ever prevent the only were gravitational waves of these functions could be spins from aligning themselves that were passing through helpful in creating drugs for in a stable order. In the proposed Earth measured for the very conditions such as vision loss, fluctuation that would result, first time, but also, the origin heart failure and epilepsy. spins would alternately attract of these waves are astronomical Miller and Ernst co-direct and repel each other in a ‘love objects that have hitherto never CIFAR’s program in Molecu- triangle,’ where no arrangement been observed.” lar Architecture of Life. The can satisfy all of the electrons. research was published in This is called a spin liquid be- Nature Chemistry. cause of its shifting nature.

VISION STARTS WITH A TURBO CHEMICAL REACTION IN THE EYES

CIFAR researchers have dis- covered that the first molecular reaction in vision generation happens much faster than any previously known biological process. The first steps of vision take place in specialized cells in our eyes called photoreceptors. The pigment in these photorecep- tors is called rhodopsin. When light hits rhodopsin it causes a Electrons aligned in a ‘love triangle’ can’t align their spins. Photo: Courtesy of Takashi Ima

8 ADVANCES

The challenge was to deter- mine if the spin liquid state existed near absolute zero, the lowest theoretically possible temperature, or if at that tem- perature it ‘froze’ into a fixed pattern of spin orientations. To investigate, the researchers used a sample of a copper material called herbertsmithite and nu- clear magnetic resonance. What they found was ‘smoking-gun’ The lung inflammation caused by asthma, shown here, is linked to lack of gut bacteria.Photo: Yale Rosen evidence that the spin liquid state exists at this temperature. ing of how stars live and die, as this research with colleagues in well as our understanding of Science Translational Medicine. how matter behaves in the ex- The researchers analyzed the treme conditions of space. microbes found in the feces of KASPI WINS “I am profoundly thrilled and 319 three-month-old babies, HERZBERG MEDAL humbled to receive the NSERC 22 of whom would go on to de- Herzberg Gold Medal. It is truly velop asthma by the age of three Victoria Kaspi, the CIFAR overwhelming to think that I am years. Four specific types of R. Howard Webster Foun- in the same category as some of bacteria were missing from the dation Fellow, has received its previous recipients,” Kaspi says. feces of those 22 – Faecalibac- Canada’s top award in the phys- She is the first woman to receive terium, Lachnospira, Veillonella ical sciences for her far-reaching the $1 million research grant. and Rothia, or FLVR for short. research on neutron stars. Kaspi, a fellow in CIFAR’s One or more of the FLVR The Natural Sciences and Cosmology & Gravity program bacteria may assist in the devel- Engineering Research Council for the past 14 years, is the opment of a healthy immune of Canada (NSERC) awarded sixth CIFAR researcher to win response that protects against her the Gerhard Herzberg Can- the Herzberg medal in recent asthma – a disease that usually ada Gold Medal for Science and years. Previous recipients were results from an allergic reac- Engineering. Kaspi’s study of Distinguished Fellow Geoffrey tion. Most of the children who neutron stars – the remnants Hinton, Senior Fellow Gilles developed asthma went on to of enormous stars which have Brassard, Nobel laureate John acquire the FLVR bacteria lat- exploded and then collapsed C. Polanyi, Program Director er, suggesting that it needs to – has increased our understand- J. Richard Bond and Advisor be present at a very young age W. Ford Doolittle. to confer protection. Finlay and his colleagues also infected germ-free mice with the microbiome from the fe- MISSING BACTERIA ces of the 22 children who had LINKED TO ASTHMA later developed asthma. Then they exposed some of the mice Children who lack four specific to the FLVR bacteria. The mice types of gut bacteria at three who did not receive the FLVR months of age are much more bacteria developed asthma-like likely to go on to develop asthma. symptoms, while those who re- Brett Finlay, co-director of ceived the bacteria did not. CIFAR’s new Humans & the The work suggests that in the Microbiome program and a mi- future, treatment with probi- crobiologist at the University of otics could protect children at Victoria Kaspi. British Columbia, has published risk of asthma.

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ample, stopping the cancer with author Brenden Lake (New ESSENTIAL GENES minimal damage to healthy cells. York University). The paper was IN CANCER MAPPED The CRISPR technology that published in Science. facilitated the research has, in The computer model learned Scientists have uncovered the set the past few years, made it sig- to recognize 1,600 types of of genes that are needed to keep nificantly faster to edit genomes. handwritten characters in cells alive. In the process, they Moffat is a senior fellow in 50 alphabets, including Lat- have found genes that are im- CIFAR’s Genetic Networks pro- in, Greek and Sanskrit. To portant in several types of cancer. gram, which Roth co-directs. build it, the researchers used a CIFAR fellows Jason Mof- The findings, published in Cell, new framework called Bayes- fat and Frederick P. Roth (both bring us closer to understand- ian program learning, which University of Toronto) and their ing the purpose of each gene in imitates the way people learn – collaborators used the gene ed- the human genome. quickly, with few examples and iting technology CRISPR to with a flair for creativity. turn off 18,000 genes in human Bayesian program learning in- cancer cells one at a time to corporates prior knowledge into determine which genes are es- MACHINE LEARNS the learning of new concepts. sential for cells to survive. They TO READ, WRITE AND Building on that knowledge, it found that about 10 per cent of INVENT ‘HANDWRITTEN’ learns to recognize new concepts human genes are responsible CHARACTERS about writing in other languag- for keeping cells (cancerous and es, to generate new examples otherwise) alive and growing. A new computer model learns and to develop hypotheses Performing this experiment to recognize and create hand- about how characters look. The on tumours from retinal can- written characters just as well approach drastically reduces the cer, brain cancer, ovarian cancer as people, and can even invent number of examples needed to and two types of colorectal can- new characters that look correct learn a handwritten character. cer, the researchers also found to the human eye. The researchers also test- the different and specific sets of Ruslan Salakhutdinov (Uni- ed the model’s knowledge by genes that allow each type versity of Toronto), a fellow in comparing its outputs to peo- of cancer cell to grow. This has CIFAR’s program in Learning ple’s, and asking judges to clear implications for drug in Machines & Brains, co- tell them apart. Three-quarters development. It suggests that authored a paper describing of the judges had trouble tell- drugs could target and knock the research, along with Joshua ing the difference between the out the specific genes that drive Tenenbaum (Massachusetts In- computer-generated characters ovarian cancer growth, for ex- stitute of Technology) and lead and the human-drawn ones.

Artificial intelligence allowed a computer program to quickly learn handwriting, and even invent characters itself. Photo: Courtesy of Science

10 Childhood well-being How can research help children overcome adversity and live up to their potential?

PHOTO GRAPHY BY ALANA PATERSON

Top (left to right): Charles Nelson, Michael Kobor and Megan Gunnar.

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In November, CIFAR will hold a Forum on the MK: What we’ve learned is that there are critical Well-Being of the World’s Children, bringing to- periods, and they’re to some degree malleable in gether researchers, institutions and other stake- this narrow window of time. The regulatory part holders to explore how new research can improve of the genome is very malleable and is chang- the lives of children. ing all through development. What I certainly CIFAR’s Child & Brain Development pro- have learned in the context of this group is that gram has been at the forefront of examining the changes happen in response to a variety of pre- long-term developmental effects of early adversity, natal postnatal, and early-life environments. and in tracing how early experiences get ‘under the skin’ in the form of changes to the way genes Chuck, can you talk about your experience are expressed. in Romania and what that taught you about Reach sat down with three researchers from the critical periods? program: Senior Fellows Charles Nelson (Harvard University), Michael Kobor (University of British CN: Early on we learned that around the age of Columbia) and Associate Fellow Megan Gunnar two was a critical period for multiple domains – (University of Minnesota) to discuss what we know, language, cognition, things like that. And now and what we still need to learn. what we’re starting to observe is that as the kids get to mid-adolescence, we’re not sure we see Let’s start by talking about what research tells those critical periods anymore. us about the importance of the early environ- MG: My question about puberty is, does it re- ment on children and well-being. shuffle the deck? We’re a very long-lived species. The environments that we’re born into may not MEGAN GUNNAR: The underlying basics are be the environments we’re in at the time we’re that babies, young children, need the support giving birth. And it would seem to make sense of caregivers that are responding to their needs, that we evolve some mechanisms to be able to that are feeding them, keeping them warm and resample the environment and then reprogram responding socially to them. our biological systems to accommodate our up- We have known for a very long time that ad- dated environment. verse early life care is really bad for kids. What If I’m right, what puberty is doing is open- we are adding now is a material understanding ing up the development program. It allows it to of how it affects bodies and brains. The idea sort of recalibrate. But if life is still full of hor- that kids are resilient, they will bounce back, is rible things at that time, you’d expect sort of a true to some extent. But the evidence is over- double whammy. whelming that if we want a healthy population, MK: To me, one of the fascinating questions that we need to protect and support our young. I think we’re starting to explore is this issue of CHARLES NELSON: I think another issue on the short-term versus long-term adaptation. To what genetic side is that many people are still caught extent do responses to short-term threats lead to up in the old nature-nurture issue. So how do much more long-term adaptation changes? you move them off of that position to explain CN: Let me ask a question about this, using a that you don’t have to change the structure of metaphor: so if you’re driving a car on an icy DNA to change how this stuff gets written out? road and you start to turn in the direction of a MICHAEL KOBOR: And how do we then go from skid, you make a short-term adaptation. But if having this knowledge that there’s a little chem- you overcorrect, you may go off the road. And ical tag that gets attached to your DNA if you’re so I wonder how far you can deviate for the short living in adversity? But how do we bring it to term before the short term becomes a long term? the public and to policy-makers in a way that MG: If I’m an adult and a stressor occurs to me, doesn’t freak people out, that’s responsible, and I make these adaptations. I show a deficit for that ultimately leads to a change in behaviour? a period of time and I bounce back. I haven’t been changing developmentally very much What have you learned about timing and sensi- over that period. tive periods that have come out of the group and But if I’m a young child, I’m continuing to the work that you're doing on child well-being? develop, and I’m developing in the context of

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MG: Yeah, I’m really interested in understanding the mechanisms that might open up opportuni- ties to reorganize. Hormones regulate genes and shape neurodevelopment, so I am interested in how puberty and its hormones or pregnancy and its hormones open up opportunities to re- organize the nervous system. But other things, like intense exercise, might also open up neu- robiological programs. If so, perhaps we can use this information to increase the chance that our interventions will actually take effect. I’m very excited and interested by these questions. CN: This has implications for personalized medicine. For all three of us, in some ways it’s a matter of precision medicine – it’s a matter of, can you target interventions?

That’s why I was intrigued by your statement that the group differences might inform policy, but the individual differences may inform under- standing mechanisms. Can you just talk a little bit about that?

MK: On a population basis we might find we can associate epigenetic changes with particular environments. But that doesn’t really help the Michael Kobor. individual kid; it doesn’t inform interventions that might or might not work for each individ- ual kid. When we can zoom in on a view of the the adaptation I made to survive. Because other individual child, I think then we can start mov- things are dependent on earlier adaptations, it’s ing toward medical intervention. potentially going to have a longer-term effect. MG: I call it the cowlick theory of development. Every kid has their own cowlick, and your job What is the research question that’s most as an educator and a parent is to figure out how engaging to you now? to craft the environment that will allow them to shine, to have the greatest hairdo they can have. CN: I say individual differences. Why do I have a kid who’s been in an institution since birth So it’s really beyond simply precision medicine and who’s 16 and has a normal IQ – now the kid to precision environment, precision education. has serious mental health issues, but the IQ is fair. But then we have other kids who have IQs MG: It’s figuring out what to do with individual of 60, but they’re lovely kids. So how do you children … explain those individual trajectories, mechanis- CN: Yeah, rather than one size fits all. tically, not superficially? MG: … to create the best environment for them MK: I would echo what Chuck says. We have to develop the skills and talents that they have. been fascinated by what we can learn from And Mike Rutter has definitely shown this in group differences as opposed to individual dif- the kids that he was looking at, that were ad- ferences. And how some of the mean differences opted from Romania – that the families where can be used potentially at the policy phase. But the kids did the best were the ones that identi- individual differences can teach us much more fied particular strengths of those children. They about the mechanism and the stratification of dealt with the issues they needed to fix, but they kids as it relates to resiliency. identified something that child did well and

13 IN CONVERSATION

helped that child develop that capacity to the who was one of the people who was pushing this fullest, so that there was something that they idea that we don’t need any more research, we were very special and wonderful about, whether need action. And I disagree. it be acting or riding horses or whatever. MG: Well, part of that is true. We know that CN: Let me pose a question to these two. We have you should be nice to little kids. We don’t need a great deal of knowledge. But how would we ex- any more research to tell us that. But under con- pedite the rollout of interventions or programs to ditions where there’s a lot of adversity and we change the course of development for the better? can only do so much, can we use our knowledge MG: I think that’s the hardest thing we haven’t to figure out what things to do first and how? managed to do. Personally, I think that’s what That’s the real challenge. we ought to be talking about at every single CN: It’s less here, but in the US, as social and meeting – is what does this mean in terms of financial disparities increase, the amount of improving what is done? effort to reach out and deal with the huge MK: And at least I’ve started thinking about – disparity is getting harder and harder. Good we’ve just recently published a paper in the relationships are a big deal, but how do you Canadian Journal of Public Policy – how could improve them in a family that has so many what we know about social epigenetics in child burdens? And on a global scale, many children development affect public policy? And it’s a are being raised in poverty, or with the effects hard nut to crack. of war or resettlement. MG: Closing that gap is tough. MG: The trick, I think, is using our understand- MK: To what extent do we need to know more ing to improve what we do to prevent or shift or before we say, okay, enough is enough? I had a change negative outcomes. And we haven’t got- meeting last year actually, and there was a fellow ten very far on that. •

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www.cifar.ca/events/forum-child-well-being/14 1515 ARTICLE Dan Falk

ILLUSTRATIONS Adam Simpson

consciousness The mystery of

— Philosophers have struggled for centuries to understand what consciousness is and where it comes from. New scientific tools for studying the brain could finally help answer the question.

16 ccording to legend, someone once asked in favour of physical explanations of the mind, Louis Armstrong to define jazz. He replied, the study of consciousness remained problem- “Man, if you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never atic. Science couldn’t find a way to come to know.” For years, the puzzle of consciousness grips with a phenomenon that was so subjective. seemed equally intractable. As with jazz, there The tide began to turn in the early 1990s was never any problem recognizing conscious- when Francis Crick (of DNA fame) and his col- ness when confronted with it – in fact, con- league, American neuroscientist Christof Koch, sciousness seems like the most fundamental as- started publishing on the subject. Soon after- pect of our experience. You wake up – boom! ward came the first scientific conferences dedi- – you’re conscious. cated to the study of consciousness, along with But try for a precise definition and you run the field’s first peer-reviewed journals. Another into trouble. Does consciousness simply mean crucial breakthrough was the development of being awake? Maybe not; most of us have had the powerful brain imaging techniques, especially experience of driving somewhere and arriving at fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imag- our destination with little or no conscious mem- ing), which lets researchers look at brain ac- ory of the trip. And then there’s sleep. We lose tivity in real time. This gave scientists a tool to consciousness when we doze off, yet we’re aware examine consciousness that went beyond intro- of dreams. Are we conscious then? We’re not even spection and verbal reports. sure if consciousness is all or nothing, or if we can CIFAR’s new Azrieli Program in Brain, talk meaningfully about levels of consciousness. Mind & Consciousness is tackling the enig- And, maybe most perplexing of all: How does ma of conscious experience. The program consciousness come about in the first place? How includes researchers from several branches of do sensory impressions create not just a neural science, as well as philosophers – not surpris- signal for, say, the colour red, but also a sensation ingly, given the complexity of the problem of ‘redness’? Why do we have a feeling that it’s and the interest it holds across a wide array ‘like’ something to be ourselves, alive in the world? of disciplines, from psychology and neurosci- Until recently, it wasn’t even clear that con- ence to physics and computer science. sciousness could be a fruitful topic for scientific “Not only is there a debate about the pre- study. Back in the 17th century, Descartes won- cise shape of a theory of consciousness, people dered how physical bodies with physical brains even disagree about who’s going to provide it,” could give rise to seemingly non-physical says Tim Bayne, a senior fellow in the new pro- minds. He concluded that body and mind must gram and a philosopher who divides his time be two completely separate things. But even between Monash University in Australia and for scientists who rejected Cartesian dualism Ontario’s Western University.

17 Spot the gorilla wearing white shirts passed the ball. But the re- searchers had a trick up their sleeves – partway Cognitive science and neuroscience have already through the video, a woman in a gorilla suit provided some insights into the surprising ways walks through the group, pauses, beats her chest, consciousness works. Even the seemingly sim- then walks on. Surprisingly, about half of the ple act of seeing is a complex act, with much study subjects failed to see the gorilla. Or rather, of the processing going on below the level of they saw it – it registered on their retinas – but conscious awareness. their brains failed to raise the signal to the level “A lot of cognitive processing is unconscious,” of conscious experience. says Bayne. “A lot of cognitive states are uncon- In the gorilla-video study, the subjects were scious; a certain amount of perception is un- healthy. But people with certain types of brain conscious. And so people are now looking for damage are also unable to ‘see’ what’s in plain view. an account of consciousness which does justice Ivey Fellow Mel Goodale, co-director of the pro- to that fact.” gram and a neuroscientist at Western University, Fifteen years ago, a famous case study by re- has spent much of his career examining the in- searchers at Harvard and the University of Il- terplay between different kinds of visual process- linois showed how easily we can ‘miss’ what’s ing and consciousness. A crucial moment came right in front of us. People were asked to watch a when Goodale was put in contact with a woman video of two teams passing basketballs back and known as ‘DF.’ Exposure to carbon monoxide forth, and to count how many times the team had left DF with brain damage and impaired vision; she could no longer make out shapes. If Goodale held out a pencil, DF couldn’t identify it as such, or tell if it was pointing up and down or side to side. But when she reached out to grab it, her hand oriented itself correctly – every time. “Her hand ‘knew’ the orientation of the pen- cil, even though she didn’t,” Goodale says. After more tests with other subjects, Goo- dale began to understand that the brain has at least two distinct ways of handling visual in- formation. One pathway, known as the ventral stream, is responsible for our visual experience of the world. The other, known as the dor- sal stream, is responsible for visual control of limbs and fingers. (The two streams are named for the physical routes they take through the brain.) In DF’s case, the ventral stream was impaired – a scan would confirm a lesion – while the dorsal stream was still able to func- tion. Later, Goodale tested patients who had the opposite kind of impairment; they could describe an object, but struggled to pick it up under visual guidance. What does this tell us about consciousness? To start with, it shows that different brain sys- tems make very different contributions to con- scious awareness. The ventral stream is essential for visual perception, but not for the visual con- trol of fine hand movements. The dorsal stream is vital for visuomotor control, but not for the conscious perception of objects. It could be said that the former stream tracks how we represent

18 the world in our minds – our mental picture of problematic; after all, who would be viewing things – while the latter co-ordinates our move- the picture in his brain? An infinite regress is in- ments, based on visual data, whether or not that evitable – and not very helpful.) data is rendered conscious. Neuroscience has made progress, Goodale says, but “how the brain delivers up this expe- rience that we call vision is still a great mystery. No little man We’d like to know how the brain actually ends up delivering the experience of that colour, or There is still much to be learned about the not- that shape. We don’t have a handle on that yet. so-simple act of seeing, and matters are compli- You might say that’s the raison d'être for the Brain, cated by a number of common misconceptions. Mind & Consciousness program at CIFAR. For example, it’s tempting to compare the hu- These are hard questions to grapple with, but man eye to a camera, with the retina standing in they’re questions we shouldn’t shy away from.” for the film or digital chip. But the two systems are actually quite different. “It’s not a picture; it’s not even a video,” says Theatre of the mind Goodale. “It can’t be something that’s ‘displayed’ in our head, because who’s looking at the pic- Clearly, the human brain is a busy place. Signals ture?” (The old idea of a homunculus – a fig- flow in many directions at once; different brain re- urative ‘little man’ – in the brain is obviously gions are called on to perform different functions, sharing information in some situations and keep- ing it ‘local’ in others. The crucial point is that not all of the information produces conscious expe- rience. Most of it seems to pass under the radar, with only a small portion rising to the level of con- scious awareness. Science wants to know which bits of information rise to this level – and why. In the late 1980s, American neuroscientist Bernard Baars put forward an idea called glob- al workspace theory, which aims to answer this question, and also to explain how conscious and unconscious brain processes relate to one another. The theory’s central metaphor is a theatre: the mind a darkened stage with only a small area in the spotlight at any one time. (The “spotlight of selective attention,” Baars called it.) Countless brain processes – equivalent to the playwright, director and so on – play a crucial role in deter- mining what gets illuminated, though they them- selves remain in darkness. According to the theory, any information that is successfully shared across multiple brain regions has to be stored in memo- ry long enough for the sharing to take place, and has to be made ‘globally available.’ Certain bits of information – those that are the most salient and useful – make their way into the spotlight. To its proponents, the theory seems to illu- minate the ‘self’ – the singular ‘I’ that emerg- es from the underlying chaos of information flow. What the spotlight picks out, according to Baars, is the mental space “in which we carry on the narrative of our lives.”

19 “Any information that is successfully shared across multiple brain regions has to be stored in memory long enough for this sharing to take place.”

Senior Fellow Stanislas Dehaene, a neuro- Mental tennis scientist at the Collège de France, read about Baars’s work and was deeply influenced. For most of us, consciousness is like an invisible Dehaene has devoted much of his career to friend – a companion who follows us around determining how the brain shares and stabilizes from the time we wake up in the morning to information across multiple regions – and why the moment we go to sleep. But for people with only some of this requires consciousness. certain kinds of brain damage, that compan- “Consciousness is a selective system,” he says. ion seems absent, or nearly so. In the neurology “Out of the thousands of processing streams that literature, such people are said to be in a ‘veg- are occurring at a given moment, it selects one etative state.’ This is not quite the same as be- of them and it amplifies this information so that ing in a coma, explains neuroscientist Adrian it becomes the focus of our conscious thoughts.” Owen, the other co-director of the program and

20 the CIFAR Koerner Fellow. Coma patients are A few years later, Owen had another break- completely unresponsive and appear as though through. Once again the subject was in a vegeta- asleep. Vegetative patients have sleep-wake cy- tive state – a woman who had been unresponsive cles, can make occasional movements and can since a traffic accident five months earlier. Again, yawn and sneeze. But they don’t respond to ver- Owen used a brain scanner. He asked the wom- bal commands. As Owen puts it, they appear to an to imagine playing tennis, and then to imag- be “awake but unaware.” (‘Minimally conscious’ ine walking through her house. When healthy patients have a slightly higher level of aware- subjects imagine playing tennis, they show acti- ness and may occasionally be able to respond vation of a brain area called the supplementary to commands.) motor area. And when they think about tasks Owen, who came from the University of that involve spatial navigation, like walking from Cambridge in 2010 to take up a Canada Excel- room to room, they use a region called the para- lence Research Chair at Western, spent his early hippocampal gyrus, near the centre of the brain. career using brain imaging to study Parkin- Remarkably, Owen’s subject showed the son’s patients. Then, in 1997, he heard about a same response as healthy subjects do. Soon 26-year-old woman who was left in a vegetative Owen was using the technique to allow patients state after a viral infection. Owen put her in a like her to communicate – tennis for yes, house- brain scanner, and showed her pictures of faces, navigation for no. It was painfully slow, but it both familiar and not. When she saw a familiar worked (and made headlines around the world). face, the part of her brain known as the ‘fusi- Owen estimates that as many as one in five veg- form face area’ lit up – just as it does in healthy etative patients has some level of awareness, and subjects. The woman improved over time, and would be able to communicate through the can now get around in a wheelchair. ‘playing tennis’ technique.

21 “I don’t think we understand everything about every level of consciousness, but we do know that there are some vegetative patients who are entirely conscious.”

“I don’t think we understand everything Bayne, the Monash/Western philosopher, about every level of consciousness,” he says. says he sometimes sympathizes with this skep- “But we do know that there are some patients di- tical ‘hard problem’ view – that there really is a agnosed as vegetative who are entirely conscious. deep explanatory gap, one that won’t go away They’re very aware of who they are, where they no matter how much understanding we gain of are, how long they’ve been there, what has hap- neural processes. Both Dehaene and Owen, on pened to them in their lives.” the other hand, say they’re more inclined to the Aside from having real-life implications opposite view – that once we understand the for brain-injured patients, Owen’s work serves neural processes which underlie consciousness, as an interesting contrast to that of Dehaene, there won’t be any mystery left. whom Owen describes as taking a “top-down” “I’m not a great believer in the hard problem.” approach to consciousness, in contrast to his Dehaene says. The current approach of cogni- own “bottom-up” approach. Rather than try- tive neuroscience – attempting to build a theory ing to construct a top-down theory of how of consciousness based on computational mod- consciousness works, Owen is trying to zoom els of brain activity, and on the numerous ‘easy in on its most essential features – what actu- problems’ that researchers have begun to illumi- ally has to be happening in the brain for con- nate – might be enough to explain the mind. sciousness to arise. This view has been championed by others, In the end, the top-down and bottom-up including Tufts University philosopher Daniel approaches may prove complementary. Dennett, an advisor to the program. Consider the workings of an orchestra. You Adrian Owen is in full agreement: “I think need the conductor to oversee the whole affair, if we can truly understand how the brain to make sure everything is in synch. But you works, any ‘hard problem’ will just disappear.” also need the individual musicians to produce Consciousness, he suspects, “will just be some- the notes. Neither job is more important than thing that the brain produces – just a product the other. of the extremely complex organ that we have in our heads.” Much work remains, though, even if the The hard problem hard problem isn’t an insurmountable obstacle. For one thing, the so-called easy problems are One major puzzle remains unsolved: How do extraordinarily daunting, as scientists struggle neural processes, however complex they may be, to discern the detailed workings of sensory per- yield the subjective feeling of being conscious? ception, memory, language, emotion and more. Why should neural activity feel like anything Then there are the puzzles associated with the at all? This puzzle received renewed attention brain’s ability to integrate all of this neural pro- in the mid-1990s, when philosopher David cessing, producing a unified ‘self’ from the mul- Chalmers dubbed it the ‘hard problem’ of con- titude of neuronal traffic. sciousness. He distinguished it from the easy “As a neuroscientist, the only place I can be- (or at least easier) problems of linking certain gin is studying solvable problems,” says Mel neural processes to certain kinds of perception – Goodale. “But that’s how scientific progress the type of bottom-up work to which scientists works. And that’s how we’ll make progress on like Owen and Goodale are contributing. solving consciousness.” •

22 CIFAR fellows conducted research dives at coral reefs off the coast of Curaçao to gain a better understanding of microbial communities. Photo: Patrick Keeling

23 ARTICLE Anne Casselman

Healthy Oceans

— New understanding of microbial life could help us heal coral reefs and even give insight into how the oceans help regulate the world’s temperature.

24 Right: Integrated Microbial Biodiversity Co-Director Patrick Keeling examines the surface of a coral reef. Photo: Claudio Slamovits

ast April, Patrick Keeling are using a combination of field research and and Forest Rohwer were dogged lab work, aided by innovative biomolec- driving back to their hotel ular tools and techniques which, often, they’re after a long day of diving developing and beta-testing as they go. off the Caribbean island of Curaçao, as part of a CIFAR Integrated Mi- Eyeballs and harpoons L crobial Biodiversity field trip. As they chatted with the director of the lo- cal research station, Mark Vermeij, they had a Protists are defined more by what they aren’t brainstorm: they were in a position to quickly than by what they are. They are eukaryotes (that collect samples of every single species of Carib- is, organisms whose cells contain a nucleus) bean coral, along with the associated microbial which are not animals, fungi or plants. Some fa- communities that help to sustain them. By din- miliar protists are amoebae, algae, slime moulds ner the next day, they had 50 samples. and dinoflagellates. Others verge on the out- “That’s the kind of thing you can do on the fly landish. Some species have evolved a poisonous with a group like that, that you could never do harpoon to capture prey. Another contains a by yourself,” says Keeling, director of the IMB unicellular eyeball, complete with a lens and ret- program and a microbiologist at the University ina. Some are photosynthetic, others are preda- of British Columbia. tory; many even switch back and forth. The fellows had organized the trip specifi- In other words, despite being single-celled cally to study protists, a group of microorgan- (mostly) and tiny, protists often inhabit ecologi- isms that are profoundly important for the cal niches that we’re used to seeing in terrestrial health of coral reefs and of oceans in general. ecosystems. There are hunters, photosynthesiz- Protists even play a major role in the Earth’s ers and grazers. And there are protists that defy carbon cycle, which has serious implications categorization: hunters who can also be grazers for climate change. and hunters who are also like plants. “The last 10 years has been the age of Researchers know that protists play critical discovery in microbiology, and in my opin- roles in marine ecosystems. For instance, phy- ion the protists are the last frontier of that,” toplankton form the base of marine food webs says Rohwer, a senior fellow in the IMB pro- and are responsible for transporting atmospher- gram and a marine microbial ecologist at San ic CO2 into the deep ocean. Other protists play Diego State University. “We’re right at that huge roles in the ecology of microbial sea life edge where we don’t really know what's going through predation and parasitism. on, and so we're finding things out.” But protists have remained relatively under- Protists are major contributors to ocean studied and largely uncatalogued, largely be- productivity and marine food webs. But much cause they’re the hardest micro-organisms to about their ecological role in the ocean remains isolate and investigate. Despite their outsized unknown, and their contribution to carbon and role in marine microecology, they are not nu- nutrient cycles remains unquantified. Under- merically abundant. Also, they are hard to cul- standing protists better will allow us to create ture in the lab, and extremely complex at the more accurate models of global climate change, levels of structure and behaviour; bulk DNA which has serious implications for the future sequencing of seawater doesn’t tell biologists health of our planet. much about their life strategies. Well aware of the knowledge gaps – and of Also, unlike zoologists studying lions, micro- the urgency to narrow them as global change biologists cannot yet tag a single cell in the stresses marine systems – many of CIFAR’s ocean, track its whereabouts and study its IMB fellows are studying marine protists. They behaviour – although this is something IMB

2525 26 27 Left: CIFAR fellows handle an invertebrate they collected during a research dive. Photo: Gordon Lax

investigators are working on. More sensitive and innovative methods are required to under- stand how protists interact with and influence the marine environment. Biologists focus their efforts on certain mod- el ecosystems to infer and extrapolate how pro- tists function in the oceans. And they have been testing new field techniques perfected for the microscopic, invisible wild.

Hot spots

CIFAR AND THE The field trip to Curaçao was in partnership with GORDON AND BETTY MOORE CARMABI, the Caribbean Research and Man- FOUNDATION agement of Biodiversity Foundation, which — runs a research station on the island. “We were doing some of the first general sur- CIFAR and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foun- veys of what was there to start with,” Keeling dation are combining efforts on research that says. Coral reefs are known hot spots of micro- will lead to better understanding of marine bial and fish biodiversity, hosting over one quar- microbiology and the health of the oceans. ter of the world’s fish species. But no one had As part of a larger collaboration be- really looked at their protist diversity before. tween CIFAR and Moore, researchers in “We know that coral reefs are changing, and CIFAR programs, including Integrated Mi- we know that they’re threatened. But how can crobial Biodiversity, are working with the you say what that effect is going to be if you Moore Foundation’s Marine Microbiology don’t know what they’re like to start with?” Initiative. The two organizations are cre- Keeling asks. “You have to figure out what ating joint workshops to explore the com- they’re supposed to be like before you can actu- plexity of microbial life in the oceans and its ally start to monitor how they’re changing.” importance in marine microbial ecology and Over half of the world’s corals are predicted evolution. Workshops will cover areas such to be affected by climate change as rising sea as the mechanisms of chemical signalling, temperatures bleach corals and ocean acidifi- persistent viral infections and the microbial cation compromises their ability to build skel- communities associated with marine fauna, etons. During the 1998–1999 El Niño event, among others. 20 per cent of the world’s reefs were lost to high The joint venture builds on strong water temperatures. And another global coral- existing relationships between the two bleaching event is currently underway, project- programs. Many members of the IMB pro- ed to impact 38 per cent of the world’s corals gram are also heavily involved in Moore and kill over 12,000 square kilometres of reefs. Foundation-funded research. “We see major changes going on in the Arctic, “We work really well together,” says IMB and again in corals. If we don’t understand the Program Director Patrick Keeling. “IMB is system as it exists today, we won’t have a base- working with them more and more, both in line against which we can measure change,” says helping guide research program directions, Senior Fellow Alexandra Worden, a senior sci- informally and as members of panels, and entist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research also leading teams funded by Moore. This has Institute and adjunct professor at UC Santa been a great success.”

28 Right: A student collects samples during a dive. Photo: Emma George

Cruz. “So it’s key that we get right on it, in a the reef, which increases the amount of bacte- way that brings together the right people and ria, which can cut off the corals’ oxygen supply approaches, and lets go of disciplinary or politi- and kill them. Examples like this highlight the cal boundaries in how we look at ecosystems.” importance of figuring out the role that protists The CIFAR fellows are especially interested play in coral health and disease at the microbial in the interaction among protists and the bac- level, in addition to the other microbial players. teria, as well as the phages and viruses that in- “I think the field is recognizing that you can’t fect bacteria and protists, all of which live in the just take one or two elements [like bacteria or coral communities. viruses] and try to understand an ecosystem “We’re really trying to figure out this inter- with it,” says Worden. “If you’re going to under- face – not just between the coral, the phage stand the demise of the frogs in the rainforest, and the bacteria, but also the coral and the it actually isn’t just about the frogs. You have phage, the bacteria and the protist,” says Ro- to get all the different players and study what hwer. His research has already revealed how changed in their interactions. So I think that’s bacteria and their phages can cause disease in where the approach of the IMB project has the corals, but can also provide corals with a kind possibility for very different findings.” of proto-immune system, protecting them against harmful pathogens. Corals rely on a symbiotic relationship with Carbon cycling a protist that lives inside their tissues – a photo- synthetic alga called zooxanthellae. Like a plant, this alga can convert sunlight into energy, but Protists play a major role in the important ocean also drives the chemical production of coral carbon cycle, in which carbon moves between the

skeletons from CO2 and provides the coral with atmosphere and the ocean. Marine algae – which nutrients. If the water gets too warm, corals lose are photosynthetic protists – remove about 50 gi- their algae and they bleach. If they’re lucky, the gatons of carbon from the atmosphere each year, corals might acquire new zooxanthellae that are which is more than all terrestrial plants do. more tolerant of higher temperatures, and thus “Protists are massively important for regulat- adapt. In other words, microbes may be one of ing our climate,” Worden says. “But they have the keys to the adaptability and survival of corals this complexity in their behaviours and a lot of in the face of environmental change. other facets that you don't expect.” The sheer Rohwer points out that corals are one of the diversity of protistan behaviours makes it diffi- oldest types of animal on the planet. They’ve cult to predict how the warming of the oceans survived the past 200 million years, and their will affect them. interactions with microbes may be why. At the “I think we have been treating them in this same time, disrupting the balance of coral-reef really simplistic way, like something akin to microbes can kill corals. bacteria where you’re going to have a relatively “Corals are a tight community of microbes defined role, and it turns out they’re a lot more and the coral, and when you start disrupting any complex than that,” Worden says. Protists not part of that community, you could kill the whole only create energy through photosynthesis – thing,” says Keeling. Tiny interactions at the mi- they’re also part of the process that moves en- crobial level can have far-reaching consequences ergy up the food chain. across a coral reef. By the same token, larger- To increase the predictive power of global cli- scale human activities can affect the tiniest of mi- mate models, Worden says it is key that we under- crobe interactions, upsetting the balance. stand the behavioural and biochemical intricacies For example, human overfishing reduces the of protist life and of their interactions with other number of fish that are eating algae in a coral-reef microbes. “That will be incredibly valuable for ecosystem. This increases the amount of algae on getting toward more predictive climate models.”

29 30 Parasitologist Jan Votypka. Photo: Gordon Lax

31 The ocean carbon cycle is massive and complex. Light drives a carbon cycle that utilizes respiration and photosynthesis, to which microbes are a major contributor. This short-term cycle also feeds into a longer-term cycle. Studying microbial interactions is helping us understand both cycles better.

Light Light

CO Sea surface 2

Photochemical Rapid cycle Photosynthesis Respiration transformation (days to months)

Slow cycle Organic (up to millennia) carbon

Aggregation and adsorption

Sediment

Photosynthesis Microbial Physicochemical process processes

Not just bags of genes in the field. Hence, the importance of developing new, sensitive field approaches to study them in situ, or very near in situ. Protists’ complex behaviours make them especially Keeling’s lab has spearheaded methods such hard to study using standard techniques. As as single-cell transcriptomics, which allow sci- Worden says, they aren’t merely a “bag of genes.” entists to pick up a single protist cell and se- You can’t simply sequence the genes of a protist quence all of the genes it is expressing at any one and understand how it fits into the microbial time. They were able to beta-test the techniques ecosystem, just as you can’t sequence an eagle’s in the field at Curaçao, and plan to do more in DNA and know that it flies and hunts salmon. another field trip to the island this spring. “It’s going to take a lot of really hard biology, “If you do it under a microscope, you can because protists are really interesting at many watch the protist, take movies of it, take pic- different levels,” Keeling says. tures of it, so you know what it is, and then you It’s not surprising that a group of organ- can pick it up and get all its genes,” Keeling isms so complex requires interdisciplinary says. “So we’re going to be doing a lot of that in teams and some seriously creative lab and field- Curaçao.” His lab will also be taking a mini- work. The tools the IMB group took to Cura- PCR machine, used to amplify DNA segments. çao included a pocket-sized DNA sequencer, “It is complicated, but we have the tools capable of sequencing the full genome of small nowadays,” says Rohwer, who will be packing organisms. It was especially useful in studying his pocket-sized DNA sequencer again this year. protists, which are incredibly tricky to culture. “Ten years ago we wouldn’t have been able to figure Often, the only window to understanding their out the interface between coral, phage, bacteria behaviour or physiology is to observe them live and protists. But now we can.” •

32 33 The ARTICLE Bob Holmes secret of our success

34 In 1845, Sir John Franklin set off with two fully equipped ships in search of the Northwest Passage. Three years later, icebound in the Canadian high Arctic and unable to figure out how to keep warm or feed themselves, the remnants of Franklin’s expedition starved to death. They died in an environ- ment the Inuit had occupied comfortably for generations – so comfortably, in fact, that a nearby bay was known locally as Uqsuqtuuq (“lots of fat”).

ranklin’s men were mostly young cumulative cultural evolution is what makes and healthy, well-equipped with the us so successful as a species, and is the key to latest European technology, and had understanding how evolution has shaped our no children or old people to support. anatomy, physiology and psychology over the Yet over their three-year ordeal they last few million years. failed to learn how to survive. Why? “Our species’ immense ability to adapt to The answer, according to Joseph Henrich, is diverse environments and develop large bodies Fthat they lacked something the Inuit possessed: of know-how is due to our unique ability to learn a package of adaptations for Arctic living that from others, not to our raw brainpower,” says evolved culturally over thousands of years. The Henrich, who is a senior fellow in CIFAR’s In- Inuit knew how to hunt seals, find fresh water, stitutions, Organizations & Growth program make snow houses, heat them with seal-oil lamps and holds appointments in Harvard University’s and perform a thousand other skilled tasks far too Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and complex to work out in a single lifetime. at the University of British Columbia. The story of the Franklin expedition illumi­ “Our intelligence alone isn’t the whole story, nates a key fact about humans and our suc- or the most important part of the story,” he says. cess as a species. We survive and thrive not “We need the cultural knowledge.” Henrich de- because of our individual adaptability and in- velops these ideas further in a new book, The Secret telligence, which are rather over-rated. Instead, of Our Success, published in 2015.

35 Captain Sir John Franklin, left, perished with 128 officers and crew after they became trapped in the ice off of King William Island.

Previous: an artist’s conception of the expedition abandoning one of their ice-bound ships.

36 Not as smart evolution. This, in turn, helped cultural knowl- edge accumulate more quickly, making this as we think kind of learning even more valuable – a self- reinforcing cycle. Henrich likes to point out that of all the mental One way to learn more effectively is to skills, social learning is the one where humans imitate the right people. If you want to learn excel most compared with other species. Re- to hunt, tag along with a successful hunter. If searchers have recently shown that chimpanzees you want to learn to cook, help a skilled cook. and orangutans do almost as well as human tod- Skilled and successful models have what is called dlers in tests of spatial reasoning, tool use, un- ‘prestige’ – a new form of status, almost unique derstanding causality and estimating quantities. to humans, that is based on knowledge and abil- In other studies, chimps compare well – even ity rather than raw physical power. Humans with adult humans – in tests of working mem- have evolved to instinctively imitate prestigious ory, information-processing speed and simple individuals. (This explains why car companies strategic-game reasoning. But when it comes to and insurance companies pay famous athletes watching and imitating others – social learning, millions of dollars to endorse their products – in other words – we humans leave our simian we tend to copy what they do, even outside their cousins in the dust. field of expertise.) We’re not the only species to practice social As cultural evolution progressed, our ances- learning, of course. Chimps do learn from one tors’ environment became more and more de- another, too, as do a few other species, such as fined by cultural adaptations such as fire and orcas. But at some point in our evolutionary tools. This, in turn, began to shape the physical past, ancestral humans got so good at social adaptations of our species. “That’s been a kind learning that cultural knowledge began to accu- of duet, a kind of dance, with our genetic evo- mulate from one generation to the next, so that lution for hundreds of thousands of years,” says the whole process began to snowball. Henrich. “What we are can only be understood This changed the evolutionary game. Sud- by understanding the pressures that culture put denly, the ability to acquire this expanding body on our genes.” of cultural knowledge became the most impor- Consider our anatomy. Our jaws and teeth, tant skill of all. Any adaptations that improved for example, are much smaller and weaker than cultural learning – such as an innate tendency those of chimps and gorillas. Almost certainly, to imitate others – were therefore favoured by that’s because we have developed the package of

The ascent of humans owes more to our ability for social learning than it does to innate intelligence.

37 The process for detoxifying cultural adaptations known as cooking, which manioc root isn’t obvious, but has makes food quicker and easier to chew. Look been determined by trial and error also at our efficient bipedal gait, hairless bodies and then passed down through many different cultures. and copious sweat glands. These are best under- stood as adaptations for pursuing prey animals to exhaustion in warm climates, a technique that some hunter-gatherers still use today. But this hunting strategy works only if the hunters have the cultural knowledge to track individual ani- mals for long distances, and to find or carry water during the long pursuit – a clear case of cultural adaptations feeding back to affect physical traits. Useful taboos

Over time, cultural practices that help people grating, soaking and boiling the roots, then let- survive gain widespread adoption, even when ting them stand for two days before eating. All the reasons for them might not be obvious. In of this is crucial because it prevents poisoning Fiji, for example, where Henrich has done field- from high levels of cyanide in the unprocessed work, taboos prevent pregnant and breastfeed- roots. To the people themselves, though, it’s ing women from eating certain types of reef fish. merely what they’ve always done. Few have ever None of the women know why – it’s just taboo. seen cyanide poisoning, because no one devi- But Henrich and his wife Natalie later found ates from the cultural practice. In effect, says that the taboo covered precisely the fish species Henrich, the culture itself is smarter than the most likely to carry ciguatera toxin, which is apt people in it. to harm fetuses and infants. The same is true, of course, of our own Similarly, cultures in the Amazon process culture and its practices. Take our strong prefer- manioc root, a staple food, through an intri- ence for monogamous marriage, for example. cate, multi-step process that involves scraping, Most of us accept the norm, but few can explain

38 why, other than to say, “That’s the way it is.” recalls. He even drew on his aerospace engineer- Actually, there’s more to it. “When you analyze ing training, which helped him understand the normative monogamy, you find out it’s doing sophisticated mathematics of evolution with some functional work,” says Henrich. Mono- both genetic and cultural inheritance. He found gamy fosters social harmony by providing most a rich lode in the intersection of all these fields, adults of both sexes with a mate, and this may and has now been developing his ideas for near- have helped our set of social norms survive over ly two decades, often using economic games to many generations. compare social norms across societies. Henrich’s work is a perfect fit for CIFAR’s program on Institutions, Organizations & From Growth, which seeks to understand why some societies are more successful than others. engineering “People like Joe are really key to our work,” says Program Director Torsten Persson, an econ- to the Amazon omist at Stockholm University. “A multi-faceted approach to understanding societies brings rich- Cultural differences like these, evolved over ness to the discussion.” In particular, Persson time by particular cultures, are what attract- points to Henrich’s cross-social survey of eco- ed Henrich to this area of research in the first nomic games. “That’s a good example of how place. He originally trained as an aerospace different contexts produce different behaviours. engineer, but his interest in anthropology led It makes all of us think about the importance of him back to graduate school and to fieldwork cultural context.” among the Matsigenka tribe in the Peruvian Amazon. There, he was struck by how unwill- ing the Matsigenka were to work together for The the common good in tasks such as cutting grass. He began to wonder if this reflected a different collective set of learned social norms. To test this idea, he asked them to play the ultimatum game, a fa- brain vourite tool of economists. In the game, one player is given a sum of In essence, Henrich’s position is that it’s better money and told to divide it with a second play- to be social than to be smart: the vast majority er. If the second player accepts the division, each of our knowledge comes from other people, not gets to keep their share; if the second player re- from figuring things out on our own. fuses, neither gets anything. Rationally, the sec- “We rely on a collective brain,” he says. ond player should accept any offer, since even a “The larger and more connected a popula- small amount is better than nothing. But people tion, the more technologies it can produce.” from Western societies almost uniformly reject Isolation leads to cultural and technologi- anything much less than a 50:50 split. This re- cal poverty, as illustrated dramatically by the flects our societal idea of fairness. In contrast, Aboriginal Tasmanians. After rising sea levels none of the Matsigenka ever rejected an offer, isolated them from the mainland, they gradual- no matter how small. They had learned a dif- ly lost the knowledge of bone tools, stone spear ferent set of norms, and thus weren’t culturally points, fishing, fitted clothing and almost every- primed to expect a fair split. thing else, ending up with the simplest tool kit This got Henrich thinking. Back in North known among modern humans. America, he took a year away from his gradu- Going much further back, it may have been ate research to read not just about anthropology, isolation that did the Neanderthals in. Based on but also economics, sociology, psychology and brain size, Neanderthals were probably slight- evolutionary biology. ly smarter than us, at least in raw processing “I was interdisciplinary from the beginning, power. But they lived in small, widely scattered because I wanted to explain the economic groups in ice-age Europe. Henrich hypothesiz- decision-making of these people in Peru,” he es that they probably lacked the large collective

39 An 1879 depiction of a Tasmanian islanders. Tasmanians were cut off from the mainland they gradually lost learned skills,skills including including the the ability to make fire and fitted clothes.

brain that allowed our more social African And he says we’re probably not done chang- ancestors to evolve better cultural packages. ing yet. Our technology will continue to inter- Modern humans stayed connected, and act with our genes in ways we can’t necessarily their technologies and genes continued to co- predict. Cooking gave us easier access to the en- evolve. That brings us to today, when we rou- ergy content in food, and reduced the size of our tinely connect more quickly to more people and guts and teeth. It’s hard to tell what the advances ideas than our prehistoric ancestors could have in communications technologies will do to our imagined. And that’s a good thing, since it al- brains and bodies, but it seems likely that the lows our collective brain to be exposed to more changes haven’t stopped. ideas, more ways of doing things. “If you buy “Genes and culture evolve together,” Hen- the collective brain,” says Henrich, “then infu- rich says. “Culture has always driven evolution. sion of new ideas brings large benefits.” We should expect that to continue to happen.” •

40

Circles in the sky This mid–20th-century woodcut based on 19th-century mathematics provides a surprisingly accurate illustration of how our universe may have begun.

Illustration showing that the apparent crowding and shrinking of the figures at the edge of the disk disappear when the figures are projected onto a hyperboloid.

Right: A detail from M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit IV.

The inflationary theory of the universe, developed itself – the artist M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit IV. by cosmologists including Senior Fellow Andrei Escher, known for his infinite staircases and Linde (Stanford University), says the universe ex- other mind-bending illustrations, created a panded exponentially for a fraction of a second series of Circle Limit woodcuts that represent after the Big Bang, then slowed and grew into the infinity. In this one, rings of angels and devils relatively flat, uniform universe we see today. become smaller and smaller as they move from The inflationary theory explains aspects of the middle of the circular frame toward the the universe, such as why matter clumps together outer edge, where they become crowded and into galaxies, but questions remain about exactly infinitesimally small. In fact, the image shows how to model the way the expansion took place. perspective: they are all the same size, appearing Linde and CIFAR Associate Fellow Renata to shrink with the distortion of space. Kallosh (Stanford University) have found that In a recent research paper, Linde and Kal- one class of models aligns closely with observa- losh described how a calculation based on the tional data. These models, called cosmological geometry of the Poincaré disk represents the attractors, also have a deep mathematical rela- amplitude of gravitational waves in cosmologi- tionship with a geometric model of a hyperbol- cal attractor models. ic plane known as the Poincaré disk. One of the “That is how inflationary theory, mathemat- best representations of the Poincaré disk is almost ics and art joined forces to explain cosmological as beautiful and simple as the inflationary theory data in a rather unexpected way,” Linde says. • www.mcescher.com Netherlands. All rights reserved. Company-The Escher The M.C. © 2015

41

Knowledge you can act on CIFAR’s new IdeasExchange platform connects researchers, change makers and innovators to drive change in society.

PHOTO GRAPHY BY KAREN WHYLIE

Upper right: Maureen Fair, executive director of the West Neighbourhood House. Bottom: Axelle Janczur, executive director of the Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services.

43 CHANGE MAKERS

Ending poverty was at the top of Lucenia Ortiz’s mind when she attended a CIFAR event about the power of groups and social connections to See CIFAR’s improve well-being in communities. Ortiz is a IdeasExchange planner in community services with the city of Edmonton. She left the event that day with new platform in action. ideas, which she has since incorporated into a strategy called EndPoverty Edmonton. — Ortiz’s new understanding of social identity Visit us at – how people define themselves based on the groups they belong to – helped her team develop cifar.ca/ideasexchange a recommendation to shift attitudes about pov- erty in Edmonton, starting in neighbourhoods. “Changing the conversation was really about building a movement, which is really in itself a designed to help communities become partners collective undertaking. Building a movement is in the research process, enabling them to help about being able to build group identity on a conduct the research and also benefit from its wider scale,” Ortiz says. results. CIFAR Senior Fellow Philip Oreopou- The event that changed her thinking was los (University of Toronto) attended the event. called “Social Identity: the creative power of While there, he discussed with community groups to improve community well-being.” It leaders the idea of developing a collaborative was part of CIFAR’s Change Makers dialogue website – a site where organizations can post series. The event was just one example of how ideas for research projects and academics can CIFAR connects experts in our research net- search for research opportunities that match works with social innovators, business leaders, their interests. policy-makers and practitioners who care about “There is a missing market here, and I have healthier, stronger communities in Canada and been pursuing the idea,” he says. “I think it could around the world. be very fruitful.” This innovative platform for knowledge Future Change Makers events will focus on sharing is called IdeasExchange. The idea be- exploring issues relevant to broader society, such hind it is that the world’s supreme challenges as how to create more inclusive societies in light will only be solved when leaders across sectors of rising inequalities; and how our understanding are given the chance to talk to each other, ex- of early life experiences and individual vulnera- change ideas and move forward together. bility can help us to develop better interventions CIFAR launched IdeasExchange in 2014 for at-risk children in school environments. with leadership support from its Major Platform Since CIFAR launched the IdeasExchange Partner the RBC Foundation, which works platform, it has connected 1,340 people with with CIFAR to advance research in economic its research. Surveys show that a large majority growth, human development, strong societies of those who attend the events find them useful and child development. and start using the ideas immediately. IdeasExchange develops tailored meet- The IdeasExchange platform includes an ings, forums, talks and other events that help online component as well, with a website that decision-makers understand and solve problems. has been redesigned to serve as a knowledge It aims to build bridges between people who are hub. Visitors can follow CIFAR’s progress and doing cutting-edge research and practitioners access CIFAR knowledge through a number of who are dealing with issues on the ground. avenues, including papers and articles, time- And the insights flow both ways: researchers lines of key developments and links to videos gain valuable perspective from professionals on by CIFAR researchers. Searches can be made the ground who are working to end poverty, im- by keyword, subject of interest, program or prove health and solve other challenges. individual researcher, and the site continually For instance, a recent Change Makers event makes new recommendations according to ar- called “Researching with Communities” was eas of interest. •

44 CIFAR Knowledge Circle CIFAR is grateful to its partners and donors for helping to connect the best minds for a better world. This list recognizes annual contributions to CIFAR between July 1, 2014, and January 28, 2016, and current multi-year commitments of $10,000 or more.

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45 CIFAR’s Broader Community Government of Supporters CIFAR wishes to thank the following federal and provincial government representatives for investing in CIFAR’s global excellence and innovation.

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46 CIFAR History note AZRIELI The psychology of tyranny. Global Scholars

A new opportunity for early-career researchers Photo: Courtesy of Alexander Haslam

In December 2001, 15 men volunteered to par- more to it than just individual roles. Instead, ticipate in social science experiment. When they identifying with a group – social identity – made turned up, they discovered that they were to all the difference. Prisoners built group solid- play the roles of guards and prisoners in a study arity, while guards were uncomfortable with designed to explore the psychology of tyranny. their roles, and within a few days the prisoners Announcing a new The CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program helps exceptional early career researchers to become Over the course of the experiment, guards at- rebelled and instituted an egalitarian order. program for young tempted to assert their power, prisoners revolted However, the new system lasted only two days tomorrow’s research leaders. Each scholar will join and a communal government was instituted in the face of opposition from some of the origi- investigators in the a CIFAR program addressing the most complex and overthrown – all within eight days. nal rebels. By the time the experiment ended, the natural, biomedical and challenges facing the world today, and will receive The study made for good television and was discouraged communal government was ready to funding and support to build research networks and broadcast in a four-part documentary by the accept self-proclaimed ‘new guards’ who were far social sciences and the develop essential skills. BBC in early 2002. But the experiment was more authoritarian than their predecessors. humanities: the CIFAR also a serious piece of social science research, The researchers concluded that tyranny is Azrieli Global Scholars. SCHOLARS RECEIVE: conducted by Senior Fellow Alexander Haslam most likely to thrive when a history of group (University of Queensland) and his colleague failure makes people receptive to extreme solu- • A two-year appointment to a CIFAR research program Stephen Reicher (University of St. Andrews). tions, and where there is a leadership team that • $100,000 CDN in undesignated research support The BBC study re-examined the lessons offers them. The researchers noted that this • Specialized leadership and communications training of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment of analysis is consistent with accounts of the rise of 1971, in which students designated as guards Fascism in post-Weimar Germany. quickly became abusive. The experiment seemed They argue that evil does not flourish because to show that normal people can easily adopt a perpetrators do not know what they are doing. role that leads to sadistic behaviour. Instead it thrives because they know full well Watch for appointments later this year. To learn more about But the BBC experiment suggested there was what they are doing, and believe it to be right. • the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program, please visit: www.cifar.ca/global-scholars 47

CIFAR AZRIELI Global Scholars

A new opportunity for early-career researchers

Announcing a new The CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program helps exceptional early career researchers to become program for young tomorrow’s research leaders. Each scholar will join investigators in the a CIFAR program addressing the most complex natural, biomedical and challenges facing the world today, and will receive funding and support to build research networks and social sciences and the develop essential skills. humanities: the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars. SCHOLARS RECEIVE: • A two-year appointment to a CIFAR research program • $100,000 CDN in undesignated research support • Specialized leadership and communications training

Watch for appointments later this year. To learn more about the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program, please visit: www.cifar.ca/global-scholars

CONNECTING THE BEST MINDS FOR A BETTER WORLD.

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