The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that the virus is omnipresent and claims many victims among the most vulnerable populations. This pandemic is a wake-up call for countries that have ignored the warnings of leading researchers about the inevitability of pandemics. No country has heeded these warnings, they keep doing sexe amateur in Paris, as a perfect example.

The researchers in basic sciences, by their hard and assiduous work, are responsible for deciphering the molecular mechanisms of various diseases, including those covered by the virus. Once again, the scientists from all over the world, in the space of a few months and weeks, identified the genetic and molecular components of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and reliable and rapid methods for its detection and evaluation of its virulence in humans. These fundamental studies, summarized here, testify to a community spirit among researchers from all countries that transcend national borders. They are united to defeat the pandemic.

Several articles published in the most prestigious scientific journals have made it possible to establish the means and define the directions to be taken in the short term to counter the progression of the disease, as well as the strategy to be followed to put in place effective treatment plans.

What do we know about the new microscopical enemy?

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (also known as 2019-nCoV) responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic, cause infections by entering the lungs. Viruses infect our bronchi in the form of droplets generated by an infected person by coughing or sneezing. In the lungs, the virus, which is made up of a crown covered with proteins, attaches to certain protein receptors on the surface of lung cells. This process allows the genetic material of the virus to enter cells. The viral genetic material then takes control of the molecular machinery of our lung cells to multiply into many copies that infect other cells. Coughs spread the virus from person to person. Without a vaccine or medication to fight this viral infection, we have to rely on our immune system to fight the virus; this is why the chronically ill and the elderly who have weakened immune systems are most at risk.

Scientists in Wuhan, China – where the virus originated from – characterized the genetic sequence of the new virus extracted from the lungs of their patients. They found that SARS-CoV-2 uses the ACE2 receptor on human lung cells for infection. The same receptor was used by the virus that caused the SARS epidemic in 2002. They used this characteristic to develop a molecular diagnostic method to follow the viral infection and determine its duration in patients. These researchers have also identified antibody products that patients use to fight the virus and eliminate it. Thanks to the open and rapid global communication of these findings, further discoveries followed by other scientists in China and by two groups of researchers concentrated in the United States, Texas, and Seattle.

In record time, these different groups were able to visualize the protein on the surface of the spines and its ACE2 receptor in 3-D at an atomic resolution level. Their results made it possible to characterize the mechanisms used by the virus to infect our cells. The Seattle group made another discovery: They identified a mutation in the new virus that differs from the 2002 SARS coronavirus. Scientists from Germany and Austria have focused their efforts on identifying how the spine protein is recognized by lung cells to allow viral entry. Their work found a potential drug that blocks the entry of SARS-CoV-2 into lung cells.

A non-stop work to find a cure to the deathliest pandemic in recent history

These fundamental discoveries of the molecular processes associated with the infection have led to the establishment of an effective strategy that is used in the manufacture of vaccines, antibodies, and antiviral drugs. Another article published in the journal Science highlights the great challenge that Covid-19 represents for public health, just like porn in france in this recent lockdown. A collaborative study between researchers in the United States, Italy, and China found that restricting travel was effective only when combined with rigorous traveler quarantine protocols.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), a health research funding agency, has launched a rapid grant program to support coronavirus research. Canada may consider conducting additional research on health crises associated with recurrent viral pandemics.

For example, the new findings described by the Seattle group above on the new spike protein mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 virus relate to the work of a Canadian researcher, Nabil Seidah, director of the biochemical neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM). Dr. Seidah is an internationally renowned expert in the study of a class of enzymes called protein convertases, of which furin is one. Furin is the enzyme that recognizes the mutation in the protein in spines that was discovered by the Seattle group. In collaboration with French researchers, Professor Seidah has shown that furin could attack the new coronavirus responsible for Covid-19. Canada is fortunate to have among its researchers one of the world’s foremost experts on this class of enzymes.

Molecular biologist Nahum Sonenberg is another researcher whose findings form a fundamental basis in the development of new therapeutic approaches to counter several viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. Professor Sonenberg revolutionized the study of viruses by discovering how they cooperate with the machinery of our cells to make their proteins. His discovery allowed researchers in Texas to develop a drug currently in clinical tests to fight all strains of the influenza virus.

So, to maximize our chances of winning this fight against Covid-19, it is vital to maintain vigorous and ongoing funding for our researchers. A new finding has conclusively shown that the action of the enzyme furin on SARS-CoV-2 is essential for allowing viral entry into human lung cells in the laboratory and that furin is a potential target for intervention therapeutic.

Another finding highlighted the importance of co-opting the machinery to make new proteins by SARS-CoV-2 with an identified drug that targets the infected cell-specific protein synthesis initiator factor known as of eIF4A. The drug inhibited viral entry into monkey cells in the laboratory. These two recent discoveries are linked to the fundamental research of Professors Seidah and Sonenberg. It is therefore essential that the international community allow these world-class researchers to have access to all the financial and logistical means to support their work; for example, by giving them access to the various existing CIHR funding programs. It is not in the world’s interest to limit the research resources of our most talented researchers when such serious health and disease issues emerge.

The difficult task of communicating science to the public

Usually, politicians try to reassure us that they consult the experts, follow their advice, and that the situation is under control. But it must be recognized that in recent years this position has become more and more difficult to maintain. Unconditional trust in science, which is used to justify decisions, has been blunted. It gradually gives way to doubt or even suspicion and in some cases disbelief.

In science, it is always advisable to start by doubting, then confront and ruthlessly discuss the hypotheses and the results obtained, to have any chance of reaching a consensus. In order, at the end of this tortuous path, to have the right to say: “Global warming is certainly an irreversible phenomenon”; then to add without fear of being denied “that it is mainly due to human activities”.

When Jean-François Delfraissy, the president of the scientific committee advising the French government, declared: “We do not understand why children are more resistant to infection” or even: “We cannot explain why some infected and cured carriers are likely to contract the disease again ”, no one disputes such statements of ignorance.

Listening to this great scholar, those familiar with the inside world of the closed world of research may have had the feeling that, in prime time, scientists were inviting the public to one of their meetings. At one of these discussions, usually held in the confined space of labs, during which researchers collectively develop their research projects for the months or years to come. Their agenda is to define the questions they wish to answer, to draw up the state of international knowledge, and to take stock of their shortcomings by insisting on what they would first like to know, then on this basis, to justify the means requested for bokep. And all this without any obligation of results!

If, as they debate these questions out of sight, laymen entered these scholarly circles, they would be horrified to discover a chaotic world riddled with uncertainty. These meetings, where we consider projects without a fixed goal and without being sure that we have chosen the right path, are essential moments for researchers when they decide to investigate what they do not know. still but which they would absolutely like, for a thousand good reasons, to understand. Closed doors allow them to work in peace, to take their time, to start their experiences again as often as necessary. This isolation, a guarantee of serenity, began to give way for several decades. Patient associations, such as those bringing together muscular dystrophy or people with HIV, or associations bringing together residents who experience toxic releases from chemical factories, have contributed to what can be called the gradual de-containment of research, that is to say, its openness to human and social dimensions. The blows carried by the Covid-19 amplify this movement.

Of course, there is nothing unusual or new about such forays into public space. Whether we are viewers, listeners to radio stations, or readers of newspapers and magazines, we are accustomed to seeing scientists with prestigious titles come and go on television sets and read the columns they sign. Since Pasteur and the dramatic suspense, he orchestrated in Pouilly-le-Fort, the public has grown accustomed to hearing scientists announce resounding discoveries. But for them to speak out to confess their ignorance is a rarer phenomenon.

The current (partial) de-containment of specialists confirms the emergence of a new way of conceiving research on subjects for which existing practices show their limits. The laboratory has become a place too isolated and too cut off from all the people who could actively participate in the work of researchers. Field surveys widely practiced in certain disciplines, such as earth sciences and their geological explorations or agronomy and its experimental farms, only prolong the laboratory work by installing it outside and on a larger scale. This extension sometimes takes place by recruiting collaborators, research assistants who are not professionals but rather enlightened amateurs and who participate, for example, in counting wild birds or in astronomical observations.

The Covid-19, through the problems and questions it poses, shows the limits of the forms of organization of research in which scientists are the only and indisputable masters of the game. Usually, it is researchers who strictly determine the protocols to be followed and the experimental methods; usually, they are the ones who neutralize, as far as possible, anything that is likely to interfere with and bias their work; usually, they are the ones who take stock of what we know and what we do not know, without inviting laymen to share their thoughts. This requirement, to which we owe irreplaceable contributions, is at its peak with so-called “double-blind” study. Their principle is that no one should know, in which group this or that patient is included. In this model, the light should not be shared: it is necessary to blind to know better. There is no question of abandoning this strategy because it has shown and continues to demonstrate its effectiveness. But it is no longer enough. It asks to be enriched and completed. To participate without saying a word is not really to participate.

For the first time in history, the objective assigned to the collective formed by researchers and the population is a mathematical operation. It is about transforming the sharp curve of Covid-19 cases, whose sharp tip is likely to lead to tens of thousands more deaths and saturation of our hospital system, into a less steep curve. We are asked to imagine the right behaviors to avoid the concentration in time and space of contamination.

This is not quite the first time, although it is still very rare, that modelers have taken center stage and exposed some of the elements of their algorithms. The climate change crisis has given rise to a proliferation of models, curves and strategic variables that are now easily accessible and which specialists claim are robust and that their usefulness is undeniable. And it was only very recently, on the occasion of the organization of the climate conference, that ordinary citizens were invited to participate in the discussion of some of their hypotheses without being able to appreciate the effects of their recommendations.

The Nobel Prize is an award of international significance. First awarded in 1901, the prizes are awarded each year to persons “who have brought the greatest benefit to humanity“, by their inventions, discoveries, and improvements in various fields of knowledge, by the literary work more impressive, or by their work in favor of peace, thus following the last wishes of Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite.

In the 21st century, the prizes are awarded during October each year. The awards ceremony takes place on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel. However, the 2020 Nobel Prize winners will not receive their honor in Sweden due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The physical Nobel Prize giving ceremony on December 10 in Stockholm has been canceled, the Nobel Foundation announced this year, a first since 1944, when the world was still suffering the horrors of World War II. A televised ceremony will nevertheless be held on television between October 5 and 12, in the absence of the winners who will receive their prizes remotely in the categories: Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace, and Economy.

This article will focus on an always polemic prize: The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, which this year laureated Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”.

Why auctions are so important for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences?

Auctions have been around at least since ancient times. This has proven to be an efficient mechanism for allocating scarce resources. It is generally recognized that the history of auctions began around 500 BC. AD with the Babylonian wedding market. In these writings, Herodotus would have described first-price auctions in which the hand of young women was awarded to the highest bidder. Nevertheless, in contemporary societies, auction mechanisms have traditionally been used in agriculture and animal husbandry. There are also auctions for objects and works of art, where the principal difficulty is the estimation of the cost of production. Finally, we know the famous horse auctions in Germany, in which participants throw coins into a hat to outbid!

More recently, auctions have become an increasingly popular form of buying and selling. Thus, auctions concern increasingly complex goods or services such as oil concessions, mobile telephone licenses, or even radio frequencies. There is now a very wide variety of auctions available. Interpreted in its broad sense, the term “auction” refers to any structured mechanism of a competition aimed at determining who obtains the item in question, and often at what price by causing buyers to reveal, directly or through successive offers, their reservation price. for this item.

The first conceptualization of auctions is quite recent. It is due to the American L. Friedman (1956) who developed the first operational thesis on auction mechanisms. This work takes the example of the sale of oil drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico to private companies. During this sale, we spoke of an auction “at the first price in a sealed envelope”: the bids are not made public and it is the highest bid that wins the lots.

Like all theories, Friedman’s thesis has an important limitation: indeed, the strategies of the participants do not exist, and their future behavior is supposed to reproduce from the past, and identically. Game theory will solve part of this problem with the existence of real uncertainty and strategic interactions of the participants.

How to guess your rivals’ next step? Game theory and the role it plays in social sciences

Our two new winners started their careers in game theory. As its name suggests, game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interaction between decision-makers, rational or not, whose objective is to maximize a gain function following the rules of the game, which are specific for each specific scenario.

The concept of “game” is not restrictive. It can be chess, go, or checkers, but it also encompasses economic processes – as we will see – or legal, electoral, or any human activity that follows a set of specific rules. Game theory – which some academicians more generically call decision mathematics – has concrete applications in all areas of the social sciences – including the description of behavioral relationships – as well as in logic, systems science, and computer science. Game theory is the science of logical decision making in humans, animals, and computers.

The game theory began with a paper by John von Neumann, one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics and computer science, and a major contributor to modern economics. His first scientific paper about the game theory topic, which used Brouwer’s famous fixed point theorem, was quickly followed by a book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), co-written with Oskar Morgenstern, one of the countless thesis students of Ludwig von Mises who revolutionized economic analysis.

Quickly, game theory became interested in cooperative or non-cooperative, symmetric or asymmetric, zero or non-zero-sum (winnings) games, simultaneous or sequential, in discrete or continuous time, in finite or infinite time. Closer to us, these games have been extended to differential games, evolutionary games, stochastic games.

Each topic of analysis and probability gives rise to its corresponding branch of game theory. Each type of game has given rise to applications in various fields including the art of war. The research branch of the U.S. Navy gives a good idea of ​​the early work of many military academicians on the “prisoner’s dilemma”. Similar work has been used to model nuclear war and to make them possible “gains” of the former USSR sharply negative.

Auctions: a game difficult to understand but with enormous benefits for the gamblers

While auctions do not immediately appear to be games, it must be remembered that they are essentially competitions between agents who follow a certain number of rules. Of course, an auction with a seller and a buyer is a simple economic exchange. As soon as you add either several sellers, or several buyers, or both, you get a bid. So, it is obvious – from this point of view – that game theorists have encountered economists in this field of study.

Robert B. Wilson, in his doctoral thesis, revolutionized the study of auction systems by focusing on several aspects: the development of market rules, dissemination of information through the auction process, the learning process – what does the opponent think? – during the game, as well as all the means to make these “games” more or less competitive.

This last point is important. Auction theory was developed to build mathematical models that lead to incentives to achieve certain outcomes (such as efficient allocation of resources) while maintaining a fair market that prevents collusion between bidders.

While game theory in its early days considered only zero-sum games, in which the gains of some equal the losses of others, today it applies to positive-sum games. However, the exchanges on the markets are games with positive-sum. Merchant exchange creates value ex nihilo. The consumer earns a “surplus,” the consumer surplus, which is the monetary gain obtained because he can buy a product at a price lower than the highest price, he would be willing to pay. Likewise, the producer (or seller) earns a “producer surplus” if the selling price exceeds the minimum below which he would not participate in the auction, the reserve.

As Andy Kessler brilliantly recalls in the Wall Street Journal, the consumer surplus is considerable: even for extremely simple products, market processes lead to a cascade of exchanges that make it possible to offer the consumer goods at a lower price of what it would cost him if he had to produce them himself. He recalls that according to the work of William Nordhaus of Yale University, 2018 Nobel Prize winner in economics, innovators only capture 4% of the economic gains linked to their inventions. The other 96 percent is distributed by the market among the various players.

A good example would be the expensive Microsoft Office. After all, an individual pays around $70 a year to license it, and Microsoft has accumulated nearly $ 2 trillion – market capitalization plus past dividends – through its programs. But as William Nordhaus shows, this is a much smaller sum than the value created by each user of this software, which runs into the thousands of dollars a year per user in the working world. Like any other exchange of goods, auctions create a consumer surplus and a producer surplus.

Why this work in auctions from R. Wilson and P. Milgrom is so important for science and humanity?

The beauty of the work of Robert Wilson and Paul Milgrom on auctions comes from the ability to predict the share of this consumer surplus, prevent collusion between actors, and maximize sales revenue. In the 1980s, it became apparent that radio and television frequencies were being misused and wasted. Not only could we technologically accommodate more channels on the same portion of the spectrum, but there was also no reason to reserve that spectrum for programs that no one was watching. This led to the push for the privatization of the airwaves, a theme that recurred constantly among the liberals of the day.

The two Nobel Prize winners have suggested that Congress allow the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to auction frequencies for televisions, radios, and cell phones. This was done in 1993 when Congress passed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. The first FCC Spectrum Auction in 1993 ushered in a new era in spectrum allocation. These auctions not only earn rights for the state, they have benefited American consumers immensely. The frequencies no longer go to the friends of power or to those who are related to it but to those who are best able to value these frequencies, by exploiting them themselves or by sub-leasing them.

Quickly this was extended to cell phones. If you have a mobile phone (or a 4G LTE tablet or an IoT device), you can thank our two 2020 Nobel Laureates for making it more affordable and efficient. The auction theory developed by Milgrom and Wilson helped design new formats that are now used to sell goods and services as diverse as fishing rights, airport slots, rights of way on train lines. as well as electricity quotas.

Paul Milgrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. https://t.co/v06q3LQXw9

— All About Ann Arbor (@allabouta2) October 18, 2020

What are the limitations of their work and how their failures could affect us all?

Obviously, like all good ideas, this one has led to obvious failures in some developing and underdeveloped countries. Some governments have used auctions to ensure that they maximize the (tax) revenue from this process of allocating scarce resources, leaving little room for consumer surplus. Bankrupt states found themselves addicted to the proceeds of the license auction.

Telecommunications companies, instead of becoming more efficient, have found themselves with mountains of debt and, in the case of India, there are 50 times more subscribers per megahertz of bandwidth than in Germany.

We remember the French saga of the sale of 3G licenses in January 2001: the ultra-competent government of the time – short of dough and enticed by the extravagant prices reached by the British and German auctions – finally put the licenses on the market. sale at 32.5 billion francs after having procrastinated for months. Amid the bursting of the internet stock market bubble, only two operators, Orange and SFR, responded to the call. The operators ended up with huge license costs preventing them from investing, the process was not transparent, and the quality of service is shocking for travelers arriving in the country.

After John Forbes Nash, economist and mathematician, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 and the Abel Prize for Mathematics in 2015, the Nobel Committee recognized the contributions of Robert Aumann and Thomas Schelling in 2005.

For his part, Robert Wilson is not only the thesis director of Paul Milgrom but also of Alvin Roth who received the Nobel Prize in 2012 with Lloyd Shapley for, precisely, their contributions to the practice of the elaboration of market rules (market design) and game theory.

This year, the Nobel Prize committee is therefore completing a series of awards for the progress of game theory.