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Nature, Published online: 26 September 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-02883-8
The protein tau is identified as the core component of neurofibrillary tangles — nearly 80 years after the structures were spotted in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.
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Nature, Published online: 26 September 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-02885-6
The APOE gene, which codes for a fat-binding protein in the brain, is identified as a strong genetic risk factor for the most common form of the disease.
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Nature, Published online: 26 September 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-02881-w
A German physician’s study of a woman with memory loss and hallucinations marks the beginning of research into the disease that came to bear his name.
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Einstein received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford, UK, in 1931.Credit: Ullstein Bild/Getty
Extreme politics and wars today are causing scientists to offer displaced colleagues office and laboratory space. In the 1930s, in the turbulent years leading up to the Second World War, similar offers arguably transformed both science and politics, with hundreds of researchers emigrating from mainland Europe to the United Kingdom and the United States in the face of the growing Nazi threat.
Albert Einstein was perhaps the most famous of these scientific refugees. In 1933, before emigrating permanently to the United States, he spent about two months in the United Kingdom — first in Oxford, then in Glasgow, London and Norfolk. Although the UK visits were short, they were notable and left many legacies.
How did the Big Bang get its name? Here’s the real story
Einstein’s involvement with Oxford was initially at the invitation of Frederick Lindemann, a German-born experimental physicist based at the University of Oxford, to give prestigious lectures. As war clouds gathered, Lindemann encouraged top European physicists who were anxious about Nazi persecution to come and work in his department.
Lindemann would later act as science adviser and close confidant of UK prime minister Winston Churchill (Nature 180, 579–581; 1957). During the Second World War, while Einstein warned US president Franklin Roosevelt about Germany’s plans to build a nuclear weapon, Lindemann advised Churchill (Nature 459, 36–39; 2009) about the threats posed by German U-boats, V1 flying bombs and rockets, the bombing of Germany and the creation of the atom bomb.
The enduring relationship between Einstein and Lindemann is an intriguing one, even if not well documented. Built slowly and sporadically over decades, it was never close but always mutually admiring and played a key part at key times in both their lives.
The two physicists first encountered each other in 1911, at the Solvay Conference in Brussels. This landmark meeting, focused on the emerging theory of radiation and quanta, brought together the best scientists of the time to try to unify classical and quantum physics.
Lindemann, who had been awarded his PhD in 1910 at what is now the Humboldt University of Berlin, was the youngest attendee. In 1911, he and his supervisor Walther Nernst built an experiment that confirmed a 1907 prediction by Einstein, based on quantum theory, about the behaviour of solids at extremely low temperatures — to the evident pleasure of Einstein.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Lindemann returned abruptly to the United Kingdom, where he had spent his formative years and where his wealthy family was based. From 1915, he worked as a physicist-cum-engineer for the Royal Air Force, before settling as a professor of physics at Oxford in 1919. Based in the Clarendon Laboratory, he devoted himself to reviving the then-moribund study of ‘experimental philosophy’ at the university.
Frederick Lindemann boarding a flight from London to Australia in 1953.Credit: Jimmy Sime/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty
Einstein was one of those he called on — a famous figure, particularly following his development of the general theory of relativity, published in 1915. He had remained in Berlin during the war and had turned against the horrors of conflict, becoming a forthright pacifist — unlike Lindemann.
In 1921, they met again when Einstein came to give celebrated lectures in Manchester and London. For a few hours, Lindemann whisked Albert and his wife Elsa from London to Oxford in his car. But although the couple enjoyed their brief tour of the university, Einstein would not return there for another decade.
This was not for lack of enthusiasm. Einstein regarded British physics — in particular the work of Isaac Newton on gravity and James Clerk Maxwell on electromagnetism — as his chief inspiration. When Lindemann invited him to lecture in Oxford in 1927, Einstein replied flatteringly from Berlin (in German): “How gladly would I accept, particularly as I value highly the milieu of English intellectuals”.
‘Shut up and calculate’: how Einstein lost the battle to explain quantum reality
But other factors, including Einstein’s health, intervened. And only after Lindemann had himself visited Berlin in 1930 did Einstein finally agree to deliver three lectures in May 1931, while living in Lindemann’s Oxford college, Christ Church. Given in German, the first was entitled simply ‘The Theory of Relativity’. The second dealt with relativity and its implication that the Universe could be expanding: then a subject of great debate, following the 1929 discovery by astronomer Edwin Hubble that galaxies are receding. The third, given immediately after the university had awarded Einstein an honorary doctorate, tackled Einstein’s constantly evolving unified theory of physical fields.
The lectures themselves were of no lasting scientific significance, repeating ideas in published works or that were soon superseded. But some of their scribbled blackboard notes did live on — one still takes pride of place in Oxford’s History of Science Museum, which describes it ironically as a ‘relic of a secular saint’ (see go.nature.com/3xp87zt). Einstein disliked and protested at this adulatory treatment, calling the blackboards’ preservation a “personality cult, with adverse effect on others”. Arriving back at Christ Church, he wrote of how he “felt shattered. Not even a cart-horse could endure so much!”
He was more charmed by other aspects of Oxford. He played his violin together with professional musicians, who were organized by his friend Margaret Deneke; gave talks on politics, including his belief in pacifism; and spent much time wandering around the city, often on his own. Hence Einstein’s return to Oxford for a few weeks in 1932, when he again lived in Christ Church; Lindemann had arranged for the college to offer Einstein a five-year ‘studentship’, inviting him to reside for about a month each year during term time.
But the political atmosphere in Europe was quickly darkening, as is evident in letters exchanged by the pair in early May 1933, after the Nazis seized power in Berlin. In late March, after Einstein’s return from lecturing in the United States, he and Elsa had avoided Berlin and settled in a rented holiday house on the Belgian coast. Now Einstein wrote briefly to Lindemann asking for college accommodation in June: a small room would do, given the short notice.
“You have probably heard of my little duel with the Prussian Academy,” he wrote. Einstein had resigned from the academy on 28 March, after it had accused him of “atrocity propaganda” against Germany in his public attack on the new government on 10 March. “I shall never see the land of my birth again.”
How Einstein built on the past to make his breakthroughs
Lindemann replied immediately, offering a set of rooms, although “as we did not know your plans I am afraid they will be somewhat smaller than last year”. He also described his own urgent visit to Berlin in mid-April to meet other threatened physicists. “Everybody sent you their kind regards,” he reassured Einstein, “but it was felt that it would be damaging to all concerned to write to you” — given the Nazi regime’s scrutiny of mail.
Then Lindemann turned to what could be done to help physicists, by finding them positions in the United Kingdom. “I need scarcely say that very little money is available and that it would cause a lot of [ill] feeling”, he admitted, “even if it were possible to place them in positions normally occupied by Englishmen.”
He asked for Einstein’s view of two individuals: Hans Bethe and Fritz London. The former would go on to win a Nobel prize in 1967 for his work on the formation of elements in stars, the latter to make fundamental contributions to theories of chemical bonding. Characteristically, Lindemann was looking for “the sort of man who can work out a problem and get an answer … rather than the more abstract type who would spend his time disputing with the philosophers”.
Einstein replied, ominously, that “the Nazis have got the whip hand in Berlin”. He highly recommended Fritz London (who soon departed for Oxford) but said he knew little about Bethe. Regardless, he said, he was grateful to Lindemann for his efforts. He offered to give one-third of his salary that year to help his threatened German–Jewish colleagues.
In late May, Einstein again returned to Oxford — now as a refugee, after increasing harassment by the Nazi regime. At a public event on 2 June, he appeared sorely in need of reassurance, as he offered a vote of thanks for a lecture by visiting nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford. According to an undergraduate in the audience, Einstein seemed “a poor forlorn little figure”. Yet “his whole face seemed transfigured with joy” when he received thunderous applause at the end of his speech.
One week later, Einstein himself delivered a lecture, now regarded as one of his most influential, entitled ‘On the Method of Theoretical Physics’. He began by expressing his “great gratitude” to the university, and his feeling that “the links between this university and myself are becoming progressively stronger”. But this was not to be realized. Soon, Einstein left Oxford for Glasgow, then Belgium. He revisited the United Kingdom briefly in July, to meet Churchill together with Lindemann, and returned from Belgium to spend part of September and October at a secret address in Norfolk, to escape likely assassination by Nazi agents — but he did not go back to Oxford. He would never see the city again after he moved to Princeton in New Jersey, to the great disappointment of Lindemann, who had hoped Einstein would settle in Oxford.
Equations written down by Einstein are on display at the Oxford History of Science Museum.Credit: Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty
Nonetheless, the pair remained in touch through correspondence, and held each other in high esteem. When Einstein died in 1955, Lindemann’s draft obituary championed Einstein’s “brilliant originality, his fecund adventurous imagination, his uncompromising logic, and his clear exposition”.
Einstein’s view of Lindemann was reported by economist Roy Harrod, a Christ Church colleague in the 1930s. In his memoir of Lindemann, Harrod recalled how some younger physicists had cornered Einstein one evening and asked what he thought of ‘the Prof’ (as Lindemann was known). Einstein told them that, although Lindemann was “essentially an amateur”, his thorough comprehension of physics meant that “if something new came up, he could rapidly assess its significance for physics as a whole, and there were very few people in the world who could do that.”
Physicists and historians since have struggled to understand why Einstein thought so highly of Lindemann, who as a physicist was never placed in the top rank. Historian Robert Blake, another Christ Church colleague, remembered him as “a man of intuition and flair in widely diverse fields”, but who never achieved mastery in any one. As Lindemann himself honestly remarked1: “I can understand and criticize anything, but I have not got the creative power to do it myself.” But he undoubtedly showed his brilliance in debates, and knew how to work in a team, as he had proved in the Royal Air Force by his empirical testing of ways in which aircraft spin.
Certainly, the two men didn’t share the same politics. Lindemann’s views were well to the right of Einstein’s (although never sympathetic to Nazism). As Blake summarized it, Lindemann was “an out-and-out inequalitarian who believed in hierarchy, order, a ruling class, inherited wealth, hereditary titles and white supremacy (the passing of which he regarded as the most significant change in the twentieth century)”. Yet, in private, he could be kind-hearted and generous to those in need, drawing on his wide contacts and personal wealth.
Both attitudes — public and private — coloured Lindemann’s Daily Telegraph obituary of Einstein2. Although overflowing with respect for Einstein’s science, Lindemann criticized his liberal and pacifist politics: “Like many scientists Einstein was politically rather naïve. He hated violence and war and could not understand why his own natural sweet reasonableness was not universal.”
Did Einstein really say that?
Undoubtedly, Lindemann’s contrary personality polarized his contemporaries, as it does historians today. His most recent biographer, Adrian Fort, notes: “It has often been asked how a prickly, eccentric, arrogant, sarcastic and uncooperative man — to use some of the adjectives from time to time levelled against Lindemann — could have developed and sustained such a warm friendship with Churchill. The answer is of course that he did not display those characteristics to Churchill.” Presumably, a similar self-restraint pervaded Lindemann’s relationship with Einstein. Their overriding passion for physics united them, despite their profound personality differences.
As Lindemann also recalled of Einstein in his obituary, “his simplicity and kindliness, his unpretentious interest in others and his sense of humour charmed all who knew him” — qualities that the Prof surely knew were not his own forte. They are wonderfully evident in an anecdote about the emigré Einstein in Oxford, recalled in a 1968 article for Reader’s Digest (subsequently republished in an extended form3) by William Golding — the celebrated novelist and later a Nobel laureate in literature.
In 1931, Golding wrote, he was an undergraduate standing on a bridge overlooking the city’s river when a “tiny moustached and hatted figure” joined him. Not speaking each other’s language, for five minutes the strangers stood silently side by side. At last, Golding recalled, “with true greatness, Professor Einstein realized that any contact was better than none”. He pointed to a trout wavering in midstream. “Fisch”, he said. “Desperately I sought for some sign by which I might convey that I, too, revered pure reason. I nodded vehemently. In a brilliant flash I used up half my German vocabulary: Fisch. Ja. Ja.” For another five minutes, the unknown undergraduate and the world-famous scientist stood together. “Then Professor Einstein, his whole figure still conveying goodwill and amiability, drifted away out of sight.”
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Nature, Published online: 17 September 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-02809-4
The first circumnavigation of Earth by plane (in just five short months) and a spectacle in the sky, in our weekly dive into Nature’s archive.
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The Burning Earth: A History Sunil Amrith W. W. Norton (2024)
In the 1620s, King Charles I of England commissioned a Dutch water engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, to drain the flat fenlands of East Anglia, which he considered a desolate wasteland. Locals were outraged. These wetlands, writes historian Sunil Amrith in The Burning Earth, “sustained a richness of human and more-than-human life that was now in danger”. As a pamphleteer at the time declared, many thousands of cottagers lived by harvesting “reeds, fodder, thacks, turves, flaggs, hassocks, segg” and “many other fenn commodytyes”.
How the peanut trade prolonged slavery
Locals, dubbed the Fen Tigers, smashed the dams, dykes and sluice gates that had been installed to divert rivers. But England’s political elite were determined to see nature “bound into service”. The marshes were ultimately drained and the land repurposed for agriculture, with the benefits accruing to rich landowners. Now known as the bread-basket of Britain, this once biodiverse wetland is at perpetual risk of flooding.
This pattern of conquest and carnage — pitting rich against poor, colonialist against indigenous, control of nature against the flourishing of the wild — has, tragically, been repeated countless times throughout history and across the globe. Amrith narrates this sorry (and sometimes inspiring) saga with flair, in his epic exploration of human innovation and destruction.
The fenfolk of East Anglia, he notes, were not the first to lose their livelihoods and wild land to the rich — and not the last to fight back. People with power and privilege conquered the world with machinery and lethal weapons, but the poor and powerless persevere. Indigenous peoples of Brazil, Indonesia and India continue to fight corporations that encroach on their pristine rainforests, just as Fen Tigers fought for their marshlands. It is these overlooked environmental and political conflicts on which Amrith centres his narrative.
The fenlands of eastern England have been at constant risk of flooding since they were repurposed for agriculture.Credit: Chris Howes/Wild Places Photography/Alamy
For 600 years, many of these conflicts have revolved around the pursuit of luxuries. When Portuguese ships reached the North Atlantic island of Madeira in 1426, the colonists set fire to most of its forests, and later enslaved Indigenous Guanches from the nearby Canary Islands to clear the ground for sugar cultivation. In the 1470s, the Portuguese reached the coast of Ghana. In Elmina, they built a fortress that thrived as a centre first for trade in gold, ivory and peppers, and later for “the bloody Atlantic commerce in enslaved human beings”.
The climate crisis is solvable, but human rights must trump profits
At every stage, European colonists spread death and environmental destruction. In sixteenth-century Peru, Spaniards kidnapped Indigenous people and forced them to mine a mineral source of mercury called cinnabar — used to extract silver from ore. Toxic vapours from the cinnabar refineries poisoned water, mammals, fish and the shackled humans toiling at “the mine of death” at Huancavelica. As Amrith quotes one report of the time: “there used to be in this mountain”, it laments, “deer with antlers, and now not even grass is found”. Today, mercury still seeps from roads and houses made with contaminated bricks.
But everywhere that people were enslaved, significant numbers rebelled. In Palmares, Brazil, a 10,000–20,000-strong quilombo, or community of once-enslaved fugitives, formed a self-governing society. Most residents, who survived on subsistence agriculture and trade, had roots in Angola and Congo, but some were Indigenous Brazilians, Jews and Muslims. Together, they held off attacks by Dutch and Portuguese militaries for almost a century, before the quilombo was conquered in 1694.
A fortress built in Elmina, Ghana, was used to hold enslaved people captive.Credit: Chuck Bigger/Alamy
Conflicts over land and nature continue today. For centuries, Indigenous peoples in rainforests grew food, including fruit and nut trees, for their own needs; as they moved to new areas, the forests rebounded. By the 1980s, however, a contagion of chainsaws and burning had led to the loss of an area of Amazonian and southeast Asian rainforest equivalent to half the size of India. In Brazil, labour leader and conservationist Chico Mendes led the fight to establish forest reserves inhabited and managed by locals. In 1990, the state of Acre created the first such zone: the 500,000-hectare Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve. But Mendes himself had been shot dead in front of his house in Xapuri in 1988, allegedly by gunmen hired by local landowning ranchers.
In a similar grievous tale in Nigeria, environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa founded the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, rallying 300,000 in 1993 to protest against rampant oil pollution by the energy company Shell, which had left the landscape a “desolate expanse of blackened crust”. Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders were imprisoned and hanged by Nigeria’s military government in 1995.
Development isn’t entirely bad, as Amrith stresses. Rates of death from infectious diseases have fallen drastically around the world since the start of the twentieth century, thanks to sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics. The Green Revolution — a period of rapid development of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat and rice varieties — led to tremendous booms in crop production. Between 1961 and 2014, production of cereal crops increased by 280% worldwide.
But the Green Revolution had unintended impacts. Petrochemicals furnished the pesticides and fertilizers on which high-yield seeds depended. Diesel powered the groundwater pumps that irrigated the harvests, and pesticides permeated and poisoned the soil. In India, the revolution also perpetuated inequality between farmers who had access to transport, water and money, and “those with land too measly, too stony, too unyielding to accept new seeds”. Thousands of farmers in India die by suicide every year, faced with debt to pay for seeds and fertilizers, amid heatwaves and drought caused by climate change.
How white supremacy became a global health problem
If there’s cause for hope, it comes from those who continue to fight for environmental justice, often from the margins. In 2006, in West Timor, Indonesia, 150 women surrounded a marble mine on Mount Mutis, protesting against the destruction of eucalyptus forests and waterways on which they depended. A few years later, mining there ceased.
And since the late 1990s in Bogotá, Colombia, 44,000 square kilometres of road have been transformed for pedestrian use, and an electrified bus network has been introduced. Five hundred kilometres of protected bicycle lanes, championed by civil-society group the Green City, intersect with the bus network.
“More and more people are challenging the self-destructive folly that captured the imagination of the powerful and privileged for two hundred years,” Amrith writes. Almost 2,000 environmental activists — one-third of them from Indigenous communities — have been murdered around the world in the past decade. Yet powerful movements, especially of young people, continue to fight for Earth’s future.
For these brave and unwavering humans, we can be grateful.
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After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), then celebrating its 100th anniversary, issued a statement condemning the war. It noted its commitment to “embrace and promote scientific collaboration across the world as a driver for peace”.
This rhetorical relationship between science and peace is not new. Throughout history, many people have said that science is intrinsically universal, and that its supposed neutral language and methods provide common ground for transnational communication. This universalism, so the argument goes, can in turn favour peaceful relations among peoples and nations. But none of this is a given1. A book we edited, Globalizing Physics, published earlier this year, explores the many ways that physicists, both individually and collectively, navigated the rocks and whirlpools of geopolitical tensions throughout the twentieth century — sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.
The story of how, from a shaky beginning, IUPAP became an agent of international diplomacy, shows how internationalism and universalism must be nurtured by scientists in the changing cultural, economic and political situations into which they are inserted. It has lessons well beyond the boundaries of physics in the tense geopolitics of today.
IUPAP arose in the ashes of war. Soon after the end of the First World War, a movement sprung up to create international scientific unions under the umbrella of the International Research Council (IRC), with the idea of forging collaboration between nations and, indirectly, securing lasting peace. IUPAP was part of that movement. It was formally established in 1922 as an association of national physics committees. It held its first general assembly in 1923 with 16 members — 12 from Europe, plus Canada, Japan, South Africa and the United States.
‘Shut up and calculate’: how Einstein lost the battle to explain quantum reality
Things didn’t start well. For all the fine internationalist sentiment, the IRC’s statutes were shaped by punitive attitudes from France and Belgium against Germany, and were explicit about excluding the war’s defeated parties2. This exclusionary policy was particularly frustrating for IUPAP, given the central role of the German-speaking physics community in the disruptive advances in quantum physics and elsewhere of the 1920s. It resulted in IUPAP being, by the 1930s, almost totally defunct.
In 1931, the IRC became the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), dropping its policy and giving more freedom to the individual scientific unions3. What could have been an opportunity to revive IUPAP was scuppered, this time by Germany. German-speaking physicists were organized into several scientific bodies, and the two most influential, the German Physical Society and the German Society for Technical Physics, could not decide who should represent them. This problem compounded with the consolidation of the Nazis in power and the emergence of the nationalistic scientific movement called Deutsche Physik (German Physics)4 in the mid-1930s.
In 1931, the US physicist Robert Millikan assumed the IUPAP presidency. He had grand plans to give the union a purpose through the organization of conferences, particularly a large one to be held in Chicago, Illinois, in 1933. His idea was not only to promote internationalism, but also to shift the union’s focal point from Europe to the United States. The difficult economic circumstances of the Great Depression meant that his plans did not come to fruition. Together with the tensions surrounding Germany, this resulted in a widespread pessimism about the future of IUPAP.
Physicist Henri Abraham (1868–1943).Credit: Volgi archive/Alamy
This wasn’t because there was no international collaboration in physics. Atomic and nuclear physics were booming as quantum theory and the theory of relativity were being consolidated and technologies such as radio broadcasting emerged. Niels Bohr, a pioneer of quantum theory whose institute in Copenhagen had been a hub of neutral internationalism during the 1920s and early 1930s, was nominated as president of IUPAP in 1934. But he turned the position down, fearing the loss of his neutral reputation were he to be associated with it.
As a tragic symbol of IUPAP’s failure to bolster international cooperation in its early years, the union’s secretary-general and probably its most active member from its inception, the French physicist Henri Abraham, was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland, in 1943.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, physicists found themselves in a transformed public and political landscape. The development and deployment of nuclear weapons had significantly altered their public image, and they were now regarded as integral to state power and security. This shift occurred in a world marked by ideological, political, economic and military competition between East and West, as well as by the onset of decolonization. Consequently, the role and purpose of IUPAP had to be reconfigured.
Learning from past mistakes, the IUPAP secretary-general in 1946–47, Paul Ewald — a German-born crystallographer who had emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1937 to escape the Nazi regime — proposed the inclusion of physicists from defeated countries as soon as possible. This led to the immediate entrance of Italy and, soon after, West Germany and Japan — West Germany even before it became a sovereign state — in the union.
The spy who flunked it: Kurt Gödel’s forgotten part in the atom-bomb story
Despite these efforts, IUPAP national members initially belonged to the Euro–Atlantic political alliance, alongside a few non-aligned countries. This was mostly owing to the isolationist policies of the Soviet Union, which began to shift only after the death of its leader Joseph Stalin and the end of the Korean War in 1953. IUPAP officials actively worked to change the situation by forging contacts with physicists from the Eastern Bloc. Nevill Mott, the UK physicist who was IUPAP’s president from 1951 to 1957, declared that involving Soviet physicists was a major goal of his presidency, and the Italian physicist Edoardo Amaldi was elected president in 1957 because it was thought that he could create favourable conditions for a Soviet national committee to join.
That did eventually happen in 1957, followed by the participation of other countries in the Soviet sphere of influence. This eastwards expansion rewrote IUPAP’s international role. Physicists began to view its meetings and commissions as valuable venues for East–West encounters during a period of tense international relations, effectively engaging in what is now termed science diplomacy5. Throughout the Cold War, IUPAP officials could not, and did not, ignore the diplomatic implications of their activities. In 1969, associate secretary-general Larkin Kerwin even announced that IUPAP’s unofficial goal was to contribute to “general international understanding”6.
Political authorities in territories whose independence was contested during the cold war were interested in joining international scientific institutions as a way to gain recognition. This issue emerged soon after the entrance of the Soviet Union. IUPAP officials had to address the ‘two-China’ problem, with parallel membership requests, first from the Chinese Physical Society in Beijing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the second being a US-backed request from the Chinese Physical Society in Taipei, Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC).
A similar issue arose with the Physical Society of the German Democratic Republic — East Germany — which applied for representation separately from West Germany. These requests had potentially disruptive political implications, depending on how the term ‘national committee’ was to be interpreted.
The 1984 IUPAP general assembly had delegates from two Chinese physical societies.Credit: ICTP Photo Archive/Ludovico Scrobogna
Although governments had no official voice in IUPAP management, the issues at stake here were significant for many national authorities. Many physicists sided with their governments’ agendas, but others did not. Amaldi and other IUPAP officials acted independently, advocating the immediate acceptance of all three requests by 1960. This approach aimed to show that IUPAP could overcome cold war imperatives, behaving in a balanced way. Decades later, the admission of East Germany’s physical society was recognized by IUPAP officials in letters and public statements as a pivotal moment in establishing the union’s independence from governmental influence and defining its diplomatic role. IUPAP was among the first international organizations to officially acknowledge the German Democratic Republic as a separate entity.
However, IUPAP’s assertion that admitting the East German and Taiwanese societies was politically equivalent revealed a limited understanding of the distinct contexts of the German and Chinese situations. Unlike the Germanies, both the PRC and the ROC claimed to represent all of China, complicating their simultaneous membership in IUPAP. When IUPAP officials decided to accept both of these societies, the PRC’s physical society withdrew its request. Physicists from the PRC remained excluded from the union for almost 25 years.
Why Oppenheimer has important lessons for scientists today
Only in 1984 did the PRC’s physical society join IUPAP, following improved relations between the PRC and the United States, but also a lot of work on IUPAP’s side over the two decades, changing statutes and officially redefining membership, with ‘national committees’ being renamed ‘liaison committees’. The final inclusion of both societies became a testament to the physicists’ ability to achieve diplomatic results parallel to, and independently of, intergovernmental diplomacy.
The recognition in the late 1950s that IUPAP also had a diplomatic function led to demands that all IUPAP-sponsored conferences be open to all physicists worldwide, regardless of their country of origin. This involved the challenging task of securing visas for scientists to travel across the Iron Curtain. Beginning with a vocal protest by IUPAP officials against a NATO-imposed ban on East German scientists, these efforts evolved into a general principle known as the Free Circulation of Scientists, which was adopted by the ICSU and all its unions. Fostering this principle became a defining task of IUPAP until the end of the cold war, and was included as one of the organization’s main aims in its 1980s statutes.
As decolonization progressed and the cold war came to an end, IUPAP sought to represent physicists worldwide by enlarging its membership beyond the cold war blocs. This renewed challenges regarding IUPAP’s identity and the relationship between physics and politics.
From its inception, IUPAP was conceived of as a union about both pure and applied physics, but the meanings and the representations of both terms changed throughout the twentieth century. During the cold war, ‘pure’ was often used as a label to rhetorically exonerate physics from its pivotal role in the arms race, suggesting that physicists could find a common ground to transcend political tensions. Concurrently, the East–West competition for scientific supremacy disregarded the increasing reliance of physicists on more complex and expensive experimental equipment that necessitated collaboration across borders.
Furthermore, the image of physics as the ‘king of the sciences’ was rapidly fading away during this period7, and the significance of the discipline in the broader network of science and technology in developing countries could not be taken for granted. Two IUPAP commissions were created to address these concerns: the Commission on Physics Education in 1960, and the Commission on Physics for Development in 1981. Both still exist.
‘Stick to the science’: Nature’s podcast series on science and politics
Initially, this was marked by patronizing attitudes from many physicists in higher-income countries, who assumed that lower-income countries could not afford, and were generally not interested in, pure science, with their needs being more aligned with practical, industrial and technological advancements.
The first two International Conferences on Physics Education co-organized by IUPAP, held in 1960 in Paris and in 1963 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, highlighted this disconnect, revealing the need to not just improve physics education, but also broaden the profession beyond a pure science practised in specialized university departments. It took several decades for more-complex views to emerge regarding the relationship between physics education and developmental issues. Eventually, IUPAP physicists reconfigured the organization’s priorities, placing greater emphasis on industrial considerations, inclusivity and aligning with the sustainability agendas promoted by the United Nations in the 2000s8.
International scientific organizations such as IUPAP have functioned effectively as instruments of science diplomacy only when their scientists have explicit awareness of their diplomatic roles. That carries lessons into the present day. One guiding principle that has shaped IUPAP’s activities since the Second World War is to stop physicists being seen merely “cog[s] in the military machine”, Ewald said. Another, emerging from its disastrous experience in the years between the first and second world wars, is the commitment to avoid any form of boycott, with the goal of fostering international collaboration and, informally, being a diplomatic channel when others are blocked.
The recent response of IUPAP to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates these principles. Although IUPAP condemned the war, it also issued a statement emphasizing the importance of keeping channels of scientific cooperation open across all political and ideological divides, and reiterating that barring scientists from scientific activity on the basis of their location is inappropriate.
There is an innate tension in these positions. Upholding them is perhaps feasible only because IUPAP does not engage in specific research projects, especially those with dual-use applications that are potentially both peaceable and non-peaceable. Lessons from IUPAP’s history might not be universally applicable, being rather specific to certain contexts of scientific cooperation and dialogue. But they do serve to illustrate an central principle: that scientific internationalism is not a given, but is the outcome of efforts from scientists both individually and collectively.
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Easter Island’s famous moai statues
Tero Hakala/Shutterstock
DNA analysis of ancient remains from Easter Island shows that the population was in fact increasing when Europeans arrived, rather than collapsing as reported by some historical accounts.
The results also show that there were interactions between the residents of the island and those of South America long before the arrival of Europeans. Both the island and its people are also known as Rapa Nui.
Located in the Pacific Ocean 3500 kilometres from South America, Rapa Nui is one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth. Polynesian people began settling there around AD 1200, when its 164 square kilometres were covered in palm forests.
By the time Europeans arrived in 1722, the vegetation had been largely destroyed by a combination of rats and overharvesting. The history of the island has often been portrayed as an example of unsustainable ecological exploitation and population growth followed by collapse.
In the latest study, J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and his colleagues looked at 15 sets of human remains kept at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, collected by expeditions in 1877 and 1935.
The researchers worked closely with representatives of the Rapa Nui community. One of their aims was to confirm that the individuals at the museum were, in fact, from the island, as there is an effort being led by modern residents to repatriate the remains.
The results show that the 15 people, who all died over the past 500 years, did originate on Rapa Nui.
A population undergoing a bottleneck from a collapse in numbers will have signals in their DNA showing a drop in genetic diversity, says Moreno-Mayer.
“We are using statistical methods that can reconstruct the genetic diversity in the Rapa Nui population throughout the last few thousand years,” he says. “And interestingly enough, we do not find any evidence of a dramatic population decline around 1600s as expected from the collapse theory.”
Instead, the results suggest that the Rapa Nui population increased steadily until the 1860s, when slave traders kidnapped hundreds of islanders and a smallpox outbreak killed many more.
The study also identified stretches of DNA in the ancient Rapa Nui genomes that have an Indigenous American origin. Their analysis suggests that the mixing of these populations occurred around the 1300s.
“Our interpretation is that the ancestors of Rapa Nui first peopled the island and shortly after made a return journey to the Americas,” says Moreno-Mayer.
Previous studies have also cast doubt on the story of a population collapse. Carl Lipo at Binghamton University in New York says it was “terrific” to learn that a completely independent line of evidence points to the same conclusions his team reached in a paper published earlier this year, using radiocarbon and archaeological evidence.
He says the study confirms that the island was populated with people who lived resiliently and successfully until the arrival of Europeans.
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Download the Nature Podcast 11 September 2024
In this episode:
Ancient DNA analysis has further demonstrated that the people of Rapa Nui did not cause their own population collapse, further refuting a controversial but popular claim. Rapa Nui, also known as Easter island, is famous for its giant Moai statues and the contested idea that the people mismanaged their natural resources leading to ‘ecological suicide’. Genomes sequenced from the remains of 15 ancient islanders showed no evidence of a sudden population crash, substantiating other research challenging the collapse idea.
Research Article: Moreno-Mayar et al.
News and Views: Rapa Nui’s population history rewritten using ancient DNA
News article: Famed Pacific island’s population ‘crash’ debunked by ancient DNA
The extinct bat-eating fish that bit off more than they could chew, and how manatee dung shapes an Amazonian ecosystem.
Research Highlight: Ancient fish dined on bats — or died trying
Research Highlight: The Amazon’s gargantuan gardeners: manatees
Despite being a hugely studied model organism, it seems that there’s still more to find out about the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, as researchers have discovered a new species of parasitoid wasp that infects the species. Unlike other parasitic wasps, this one lays its eggs in adult flies, with the developing larva devouring its host from the inside. The minuscule wasp was discovered by chance in an infected fruit fly collected in a Mississippi backyard and analysis suggests that despite having never been previously identified, it is widespread across parts of North America.
Research article: Moore et al.
How a dye that helps to give Doritos their orange hue can turn mouse tissues transparent, and an effective way to engage with climate-science sceptics.
Nature News: Transparent mice made with light-absorbing dye reveal organs at work
Nature News: How to change people’s minds about climate change: what the science says
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