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aken up 8 years ago in rrresearch hunting up the ghosts of elements 8 years ago in the culture of chemistry harnessing innate immunity to cure hiv 10 years ago in rule of 6ix december 2015 desktop calendar 10 years ago in moss plants and more if you are against nuclear power 10 years ago in the astronomist unrealistic scientific optimism 11 years ago in games with words update tree of eukaryotes parasitology edition 11 years ago in skeptic wonder the science habit 11 years ago in labs post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry 11 years ago in protein evolution and other musings blogging microbes communicating microbiology to netizens 11 years ago in memoirs of a defective brain re blog june was 6th warmest globally 12 years ago in the view from a microbiologist out of office 12 years ago in inkfish the molecular circus 13 years ago in a is for aspirin the lure of the obscure guest post by frank stahl 14 years ago in sex genes evolution girlybits 101 now with fewer scary parts 14 years ago in c6 h12 o6 lab rat moving house 14 years ago in life of a lab rat goodbye fos thanks for all the laughs 15 years ago in disease prone japan s radioactive ocean deep blue home 15 years ago in the greenhouse slideshow of nasa s stardust next mission comet tempel 1 flyby 15 years ago in the large picture blog in the biology files show 5 show all the curious wavefunction musings on science history philosophy and literature richard l garwin 1928 2025 force of nature by wavefunction on tuesday june 17 2025 there are physicists and then there are physicists there are engineers and then there are engineers there are government advisors and then there are government advisors and then there s dick garwin richard l garwin who his friends and colleagues called dick has died at the age of 97 he was a man whose soul imbibed technical brilliance and whose life threaded the narrow corridor between promethean power and principled restraint a scientist of prodigious intellect and unyielding moral seriousness his career spanned the detonations of the cold war and the dimming of the enlightenment spirit in american public life he was without fanfare or affectation the quintessential citizen scientist at once a master of equations and a steward of consequence when you needed objective scientific advice on virtually any technological or defense related question you asked dick garwin even when you did not like the advice especially when you did not like it and yet he was described as the most influential scientist you have never heard of legendary in the world of physics and national security but virtually unknown outside it he was born in cleveland in 1928 to jewish immigrants from eastern europe and quickly distinguished himself as a student whose mind moved with the inexorable clarity of first principles his father was an electronics technician and high school science teacher who moonlighted as a movie projectionist as a young child garwin was already taking things apart with the promise of reassembling them by the age of 21 he had earned his ph d under enrico fermi who legend has it once remarked that garwin was the only true genius he had ever met this was not idle flattery after fermi dick garwin might be the closest thing we have had to a universal scientist who understood the applied workings of every branch of physics and technology there was no system whose principles he did not comprehend whether mechanical electrical or thermodynamic no machine that he could not fix no calculation that fazed him just two years after getting his ph d garwin would design the first working hydrogen bomb a device of unprecedented and appalling potency whose test dubbed ivy mike would usher in a new and even graver chapter of the nuclear age yet garwin was never intoxicated by power because he thought the creation of the hydrogen bomb was driven by the exigencies of the age he did not regret his work but neither did he revel in it seeking instead to control its worst excesses for decades his contribution remained unknown and he never bothered to update the record saying that he could either get something done or get credit for it but not both unlike many of his contemporaries who leapt eagerly into the vortex of cold war prestige and developed the braggadocio to go along with it garwin remained a paradoxical figure at once the architect of supreme destructive force and one of its most persistent critics he understood perhaps more than any other scientist of his generation that technical brilliance without ethical deliberation is merely efficiency in the service of catastrophe he understood that his main job was to shoot down boondoggles and billion dollar bad ideas which were a defense department specialty as perhaps the best example of how he saw his main function as offering stone cold sober advice based on the best technical analysis he along with hans bethe pointed out fatal flaws with the johnson administration s abm system and the reagan administration s sdi strategic defense initiative derisively called star wars system as a member of nixon s science advisory council he killed the proposal for a supersonic jetliner after citing noise pollution and structural concerns in return the vindictive nixon killed the science advisory council garwin would advise every president from truman to obama republican and democrat alike offering a rare and vanishing example of a mind that could not be bought flattered or ideologically corralled george w bush awarded him the national medal of science obama the nation s highest civilian honor the presidential medal of freedom he advised kennedy during the cuban missile crisis pushed for the anti ballistic missile treaty under nixon helped obama deal with the deep horizon oil spill and warned presciently of the folly of weaponizing space from submarines to space weapons from missile defense to nuclear disarmament from oil spills to solar power there was no field in which garwin was not an expert often the preeminent expert long after his hydrogen bomb design became a grim historical footnote his advocacy for arms control transparency and rational defense policy continued unabated earnest unfashionable and above all indispensable as the physicist freeman dyson who was one of his fellow technical experts put it garwin was a prime example of how one man with a backpack could beat an army of government bureaucrats if only that man s name was dick garwin but to speak only of his role in the nuclear age is to risk caricature garwin s genius was dazzlingly catholic his parallel career at ibm mirrored some of the great technological innovations of our modern age ibm prized him so highly that they allowed him to spend a third of his time doing classified government work on their dime and their astute hiring decision paid off in spades garwin s fingerprints are found in the design of gravitational wave detectors in the refinement of mri technology in the development of gps and satellite reconnaissance systems he contributed to the understanding of superconductivity to the design of the compact disc and the touch screen to cryptography and to high energy physics he narrowly missed the nobel prize for an experiment he conducted in his 20s to demonstrate what s called parity violation in beta decay and he did all this with a kind of quiet omnidirectional intensity that shunned limelight but advanced civilization in tangible ways garwin authored over 500 scientific papers many of them marked not just by precision but by restraint proposing solutions rather than pronouncements elevating fact over flourish he felt it his public responsibility to put almost the entire corpus of his unclassified work online at the garwin archive more than 1600 pages of presentations talks and technical analysis covering almost every defense related topic if the academy in recent decades has become a theater of self display garwin belonged to an older order one in which brilliance did not demand amplification and integrity required no branding as he said in a documentary made about him a few years ago the preservation of our democracy was his lodestar nothing else mattered if that goal could not be achieved garwin kept on working traveling advising relentlessly until almost his last day when he was 88 i had the privilege of having an email exchange with him about a project i was working on my one paragraph question was answered with four paragraphs less than an hour after my message characteristic of dick he also pointed me to technical tools that could aid my query he sent me a touching obituary he had written of his wife of more than sixty five years lois who had just died and who had been his pillar in supporting him and raising their three children it is difficult not to view garwin s passing as something more than a personal loss it is the departure of a type perhaps the last of a type a scientist who not only understood the arcana of physics but who grasped the frailty of human institutions and the perils of unmediated power a man who could with equal ease work out a thermonuclear cascade and dismantle a delusion in a senate hearing room that such a figure would exit the stage at a moment not just when the world sorely needs him but when the machinery of government not only disregards scientific counsel but actively spurns it preferring instead the solipsistic comfort of invented facts fueled by ideological biases renders his absence all the more acute garwin represented the moral and intellectual ballast that keeps a civilization grounded and without which it begins to drift there were a select few handful like him hans bethe freeman dyson sidney drell but he was the last that we are now adrift makes his departure feel less like the close of a chapter than the dimming of the last light on the horizon his life to those who knew it offers a retort to cynicism in an age when expertise is increasingly sneered at and when the distinction between persuasion and knowledge is recklessly blurred richard garwin stood for the proposition that facts still matter that thought must precede action and that it is possible however rarely for brilliance to be in the service of restraint rather than abandon 0 comments labels arms control garwin history of science nuclear weapons physics preventing misuse of chemistry cloud labs by bad actors by wavefunction on tuesday january 14 2025 cloud labs promise to significantly accelerate synthesis and testing by lowering cost and technology barriers for both good and bad actors potential strategies for preventing misuse are explored automated chemical synthesis platforms especially cloud based labs which represent an exciting emerging frontier represent a potentially revolutionary step forward in scientific research they offer the potential to accelerate discovery in fields such as pharmaceuticals materials science and environmental chemistry by setting up and running experiments more intelligently most importantly by abstracting away technical details like specific instrumentation and consumable types and dimensions these cloud labs can truly democratize science by enabling scientists and students who lack capital and access to sophisticated equipment to run experiments remotely from their laptops however as with all powerful technologies these platforms also present significant risks a particular concern is the misuse of dual use chemicals chemical precursors that can be used for both legitimate scientific purposes and nefarious activities such as creating illegal drugs explosives or chemical weapons the lowering of barriers to the knowledge and capabilities needed to synthesize a chemical compound using a cloud lab concomitantly comes with the increased risk of relatively unsophisticated actors both state and non state using such a system to make dangerous chemical agents to mitigate these risks while enabling legitimate research it is essential to implement a robust framework combining technological controls human oversight regulatory compliance and ethical principles on the technical side there are two levels at which such control can be exerted the supply chain level and the software layer level chemical vendors already have restrictions and controls in place for ordering legitimately hazardous or controlled substances however since many chemical precursors are benign by themselves and because the sheer scale enabled by cloud labs can make it unrealistic for vendors to have a foolproof system of control there need to be checks and balances at the level of the software level as well a particularly attractive feature of these checks and balances is that they involve identifying compounds by their smiles strings or a variety of other cheminformatics formats the kinds of chemical recognition that are now standard in every chemical database or modeling software cloud labs in a nutshell a cloud lab is a software system for programmatically setting up and running experiments in a centralized or distributed remote facility typically one that is heavily automated and enabled by robotic experimentation cloud labs are highly attractive for two reasons first because they can enable anyone without access to infrastructure to run experiments from their web browser at low cost and second because they can lower barriers to running experiments by only needing users to specify high level experimental protocols while abstracting away low level details like consumables test tubes vials etc specific instrumentation and other laboratory equipment as such cloud labs promise to revolutionize the practice of science by democratizing it the problem of dual use chemicals dual use chemicals are substances that have legitimate scientific or industrial applications but can also be used to create harmful products for example chemicals used in pharmaceutical research might also serve as precursors for illegal narcotics while industrial compounds could be weaponized to produce explosives or toxins in fact except for obvious examples like sarin whose illegal use is well known the very fact that almost any chemical reagent can be dual use illustrates the nature of the problem the key challenge in managing dual use chemicals is balancing accessibility and security scientists require access to these chemicals for critical research yet misuse by malicious actors could have devastating consequences and could also put them out of reach of legitimate applications a comprehensive strategy is required to prevent misuse while ensuring that legitimate researchers can continue their work unhindered several such strategies can be imagined 1 tier based access to address the dual use dilemma one of the most effective strategies is implementing tier based access based on the risk level associated with a particular chemical and the qualifications of the user chemicals can be classified into different tiers based on their potential for misuse low risk chemicals bas...