Dead, Not Forgotten

Famed author and thinker Arthur C. Clarke died March 19, 2008, at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka after experiencing breathing problems. He was 90 years old. He had suffered from post-polio syndrome since 1988.

Clarke’s impact on science, literature and popular culture cannot be underestimated. He always seemed to go places no one had gone before and it is easy to see how he would get there if you consider his well known three laws.

1. “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
2. “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
3. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C. Clarke was born December 16, 1917 in Minehead, Somerset, United Kingdom and earned a first-class degree in mathematics and physics at King’s College London. Though he is best known for his works of fiction, he also impacted real science with more than just his thinking. During WWII he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early warning radar defense system which contributed to the RAF’s success during the Battle of Britain. After the war he served as the Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society. He is credited as the first person to promote the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal for communication purposes.

Clarke’s most famous work of literature is “A Space Odyssey.” It is based upon his 1948 work, “The Sentinel,” which he wrote for a BBC competition. The work was not accepted for the competition but the stage was set for a primary theme of Clarke’s work, an advanced but clueless mankind is shocked into growth by its interaction with a superior alien intelligence. Of course, the book was made into the famous science fiction move, “2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Arthur C. Clarke moved to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1956. In Sri Lanka is was able to persu one of his greatest loves, scuba diving. Sri Lanka also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise, in which he first described a space elevator. This, he believes, will be his ultimate legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete.

A space elevator is described as “… a tether, usually in the form of a cable or ribbon, spanning from the surface near the equator to a point beyond geosynchronous orbit. As the planet rotates, the inertia at the end of the tether counteracts gravity, and also keeps the cable taut. Vehicles can then climb the tether and reach orbit without the use of rocket propulsion. Such a structure could hypothetically permit delivery of cargo and people to orbit at a fraction of the cost of launching payloads by rocket.”

I think of Clarke when I hear people talk about the possibility of life other than on earth. He summed it up well when he said, “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

We are a little more alone in the universe today having lost Arthur C. Clarke.

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The Alex Foundation has just announced that “according to the vet who conducted the necropsy, there was no obvious cause of death.”

Alex had a complete physical just two weeks ago and was found to be in good health.

The Alex Foundation will continue its work using other African Grey parrots in its program.

Dead, Not Forgotten’s obituary of Alex follows this post or can be found here.

Read the entire press release

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The Alex Foundation announced that the famed and beloved African Grey parrot, Alex, was found dead this morning, September 7, 2007, of unknown causes. The cause of death is expected to be announced in a press conference on Monday.

It is reported that Alex was fine yesterday and his death was totally unexpected.

Alex was purchased by Dr. Irene Pepperberg in 1977 at a Chicago pet store. He has been the featured African Grey parrot in more than 30 years of research into the intelligence of African Grey parrots, most recently at the Department of Psychology at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA.

Though he had his detractors, such as Noam Chomsky who called Alex’s talents “operant conditioning”, Alex’s intelligence is quite amazing. As far back as 2002 Alex had a vocabulary of more than 100 words and as far back as 1999 he could “identify 50 different objects and cognize quantities up to 6; that he could distinguish 7 colors and 5 shapes, and understand the concepts of “bigger”, “smaller”, “same”, and “different,” and that he was learning “over” and “under” according to the New York Times.

Wonderful stories about Alex came not only from his intelligence but also from his charm and humor. One episode that sticks with me involves a press conference where Dr. Pepperberg was trying to get Alex to identify the shape and color of an object she was hold in front of him. He gave her the cold shoulder by not saying a word, and the press conference was falling flat. Pepperberg decided to leave the stage to get another African Grey, hoping it would help Alex lighten up and respond as hoped. No sooner had she left then Alex looked at the gathered press and said very quietly, into the microphone, to the delight of his audience, “Triangle. Purple.” It sure seems like he had more going for him than Noam thought.

Thanks, Alex, for showing humans — the one animal that thinks it isn’t an animal — that animals are intelligent, even Noam Chomshky.

I will publish Alex’s cause of death next week, when it is announced.

Click here for cause of death information

For more information:
Visit the Alex Foundation website

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Renowned British scientists Anne McLaren and her ex-husband Donald Michie died together July 7, 2007 in a solo car crash on England’s M11 while they were traveling from Cambridge to London. Their car left the road and hit a tree.

Anne McLaren and Donald Michie met and married in 1952 while students at Oxford. Anne was Donald’s second wife (his first marriage ended in divorce in 1949.) He and McLaren divorced in 1959 but resumed their relationship and shared a house after the death of Michie’s third wife from cancer in 2002.

Given each of their pioneering, independent impacts on some of the most notable technologies of our times, they could easily be seen as a couple of the future from a scientific point of view. Personally it was the same, even though they divorced early on, they ended up back together again late in life. And of course, as said above, they were together at the time of their deaths. They are a love story of modern times.

Dame Anne McLaren, developmental biologist and embryo expert.

In 1958, as part of an effort to distinguish between the effects of genes on an embryo’s development and any effects that the host uterus may introduce, Anne McLaren and John D. Biggers, removed mouse embryos and held them in culture for a period of time before implanting them in the uterus of another mouse. The outcome was an offspring that had a different number of vertebrae than the genetic mother, indicating an unknown influence in the host uterus and a great advance in our understanding of reproduction.

Her husband Michie worked together with her in these formative years developing techniques for transplanting embryos to in-vitro fertilization. Between the birth of Louise Brown, the first test tube baby born in 1978 in England, and today, more than 115,000 in vitro births have occurred in the United States alone.

Another area of investigation for Anne McLaren was chimeras in mice. According to Wikipedia, a chimera is “an animal that has two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated in different zygotes. ” McClaren’s book, Mammalian Chimaeras (1976), is an important work in the field. A later book, Germ Cells and Soma: A New Look at an Old Problem (1980), was also held in esteem.

Increasingly she was asked to comment on the ethical questions surrounding biological research. Anne McLaren favored using both adult stem-cell lines and human embryos, as one may yield results that the other may not. In 2001 she wrote in the journal Nature: “Let a thousand stem cell lines bloom — but let them bloom in full view of all…so that they can be subject to scientific and ethical review, freely available for research and one day, perhaps, for treating diseases.” I’m guessing that Anne McLaren may also have been a gardener.

Donald Michie, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Expert.

During WWII, Michie attended the School of Codes and Ciphers in Bedford, England where he was trained in cryptography. Soon he was transfered to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where he was assigned to the “Testery”, a group working on solving the German high-level teleprinter cipher, code-named Fish.

There Michie met and befriended Alan Turing, a coworker at the Testery who eventually went on to be regarded as the father of modern computer science. The two spent hours discussing the possibility that computers could be programmed to display intelligence. It was these discussions that formed the basis of his groundbreaking work in Artificial Intelligence.

Michie’s greatest achievement at the “Testery” came in April 1944 when he invented a technique that used the Colossus computer (an early computer developed there during the war) to automatically decode the secondary wheel of the Lorentz machine, the machine the Germans used for encoding Fish. His invention gave the Allied Forces a substantial advantage by radically reducing the time needed to decode German messages.

After the war Michie attained a DPhil in mammalian genetics from Oxford, where he and Anne McLaren met and fell in love. They worked together in the 1950’s pioneering techniques related to in-vitro fertilization at London University and at University of Edinburgh.

Michie’s attention returned to the field of Artificial Intelligence in the early 1960s, after his divorce from Anne McLaren in 1959.

To determine whether computers could be programmed to learn from experience, Donald Michie developed a game playing machine called Menace, for which he developed a general-purpose learning algorithm called Boxes. Because no computers were available to him in the early 196o’s, he hand-simulated the Boxes algorithm, using a device made from an assembly of matchboxes. Menace stood for Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine and it well demonstrated the capability of machines to learn and apply feedback to achieve continued learning.

By 1963 Michie had formed an artificial-intelligence research group in Edinburgh. With the support of the Edinburgh vice-chancellor, Sir Edward Appleton, Michie established the Experimental Programming Unit in 1965. In 1967 he was appointed to a personal chair of machine intelligence and became the first director of the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception. The pace continued until 1973 when circumstances conspired to quell the activity in AI research in Edinburgh and elsewhere.

His most visible achievement of the period was Freddy II, the world’s first laboratory robot that used computer vision feedback to assemble complex products from a pile of parts. Industry was not quick to catch on though and this work did not find the audience it deserved until the 1980s. Eventually manufacturing firms, like auto manufacturers in Japan, began to embrace the technologies he developed and he spent many years helping industry apply concepts regarding robotics, learning and artificial intelligence.

Having been made the head of the Turing Trust in Cambridge, Donald Michie founded the Turing Institute in Glasgow in 1986, in honor of Turing’s key contributions to the field of computer science. He continued to work after his retirement in the early 1990s.

For more information:
Read Donald Michie’s CV
View Donald Michie’s website
Read Anne McLaren’s profile at the Royal Society website

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