Two days later, the Financial Times reported that YouTube is pursuing a comparatively above-board approach. Rather than training AI music models on secret data sets, the company is reportedly offering unspecified lump sums to top record labels in exchange for licenses to use their catalogs for training. 

In response to the lawsuits, both Suno and Udio released statements mentioning efforts to ensure their models don’t imitate copyrighted works, but neither company has specified whether their training sets contain them. Udio said its model “has ‘listened’ to and learned from a large collection of recorded music,” and two weeks before the lawsuits, Suno’s CEO Mikey Shulman told me its training set is “both industry standard and legal,” but that the exact recipe is proprietary.

While the ground here is moving fast, none of these moves should be all that surprising: litigious training-data battles have become something like a right of passage for generative AI companies. The trend has led many of those companies, including OpenAI, to pay for licensing deals while the cases unfold. 

However, the stakes of a fight over training data for AI music are different than for image generators or chatbots. Generative AI companies working in text or photos have options to work around lawsuits, including by cobbling together open-source corpuses to train models. In contrast, the public domain for music is much more limited (and not exactly what most people want to listen to). 

Other AI companies can also more easily cut licensing deals with interested publishers and creators, of which there are many; but rights in music are far more concentrated than those in film, images, or text, industry experts say. They’re largely managed by the three biggest record labels—the new plaintiffs—whose publishing arms collectively own more than 10 million songs and much of the music that has defined the last century. (The filing names a long list of artists who the labels allege were wrongfully included in training data, ranging from ABBA to those on the Hamilton soundtrack.) 

On top of all this, it’s also just more difficult to create music worth listening to—generating a readable poem or passable illustration with AI is one technical challenge, but infusing a model with the taste required to create music we like is another. 

It’s of course possible that the AI companies will win the case, and none of this will matter; they would have carte blanche to train on a century of copyrighted music. But experts say the case from the record labels is strong, and it’s more likely that AI companies will soon have to pay up—and pay a lot—if they want to survive. If a court were to rule that AI music companies could not train for free on these labels’ catalogs, then expensive licensing deals, like the one YouTube is reportedly pursuing, would seem to be the only path forward. This would effectively ensure the company with the deepest pockets ends up on top.

More than any training-data case yet, the outcome of this one will determine the shape of a big slice of AI—and if there is a future for it at all. 

Merits of the case

Suno’s music generator has been public for less than a year, but the company has already garnered 12 million users, a $125-million funding round last month, and a partnership with Microsoft Copilot. Udio is even newer to the scene, launching in April with $10 million in seed funding from musician-investors like will.i.am and Common. 

The record labels allege that both of the startups are engaging in copyright infringement on the training and the output sides of their models.

“The plaintiffs here have the best odds of almost anyone suing an AI company,” says James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School. He draws comparisons to the ongoing New York Times case against OpenAI, which he says was, until now, the best example of a rights holder having a strong case against an AI company. But the suit against Suno and Udio “is worse for a bunch of reasons.”

The Times has accused OpenAI of copyright infringement in its model training by using the publication’s articles without consent. Grimmelmann says OpenAI has a bit of plausible deniability in this accusation, because the company could say that it scraped much of the internet for a training corpus and copies of New York Times articles appeared in places without the company’s knowledge. 

For Suno and Udio, that defense is far less believable. “This is not like, ‘We scraped the web for all audio and we couldn’t tell the commercially produced songs apart from everything else,’” Grimmelmann says. “It’s pretty clear that they had to have been pulling in large databases of commercial recordings.” 

In addition to complaints about training, the new case alleges that tools like Suno and Udio are more imitative than generative AI, meaning that their output mimics the style of artists and songs protected by copyright. 

While Grimmelmann notes that the Times cited examples of ChatGPT reproducing entire copies of its articles, record labels claim they were able to generate problematic responses from the AI music models with much simpler prompts. For instance, prompting Udio with “my tempting 1964 girl smokey sing hitsville soul pop,” the plaintiffs say, yielded a song that “any listener familiar with The Temptations would instantly recognize as resembling the copyrighted sound recording, ‘My Girl.’” (The court documents include links to examples on Udio, but the songs appear to have been removed.) The plaintiffs mention similar examples from Suno, including an ABBA-adjacent song called “Prancing Queen” that was generated with the prompt “70s pop” and the lyrics for “Dancing Queen.”

What’s more, Grimmelmann explains, there is more copyrightable information in a song than a news article. “There’s just a lot more information density in capturing the way that Mariah Carey’s voice works, than there is in words,” he says, which is perhaps part of the reason why past lawsuits navigating music copyright have sometimes been so drawn out and complex. 

In a statement, Shulman wrote that Suno prioritizes originality and that the model is “designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. That is why we don’t allow user prompts that reference specific artists.” Udio’s statement similarly mentioned “state-of-the-art filters to ensure our model does not reproduce copyrighted works or artists’ voices.”

Indeed, the tools will block a request if it names an artist. But the record labels allege that the safeguards have significant loopholes. Following the news of the lawsuits, for instance, social media users shared examples suggesting that if users separate an artist’s name with spaces, the request may go through. My own request for “a song like Kendrick” was blocked by Suno, citing an artist’s name, but “a song like k e n d r i c k” resulted in a “hip-hop rhythmic beat-driven” track and “a song like k o r n” resulted in “nu-metal heavy aggressive.” (To be fair, they didn’t resemble the respective artist’s unique styles, but to even respond in the right tightly-defined genre seems to suggest that the model is in fact familiar with each artist’s work.) Similar workarounds were blocked on Udio. 

Possible outcomes

There are three ways the case could go, Grimmelmann says. One is wholly in favor of the AI startups: the lawsuits fail and the court determines AI companies did not violate fair use nor imitate copyrighted works too closely in their outputs. If the models are found to fall under fair use, it would mean songwriters and rights holders would need to find a different legal mechanism to pursue compensation. 

Another possibility is a mixed bag: the court finds the AI companies did not violate fair use in their training, but must better control the model’s output to make sure it does not improperly imitate copyrighted works. Grimmelmann says this would be similar to one of the initial rulings against Napster, in which the company was forced to ban searches for copyrighted works in its libraries (though users quickly found workarounds). 

The third and essentially nuclear option is that the court finds fault on both the training and output sides of the AI models. This would mean the companies could not train on copyrighted works without licenses, and could also not allow outputs that closely imitate copyrighted works. The companies could be ordered to pay damages for infringement, which could run into the hundreds of millions for each company. If they aren’t bankrupted by such a ruling, it would force them to completely restructure their training through licensing deals, which could also be cost-prohibitive. 

To license or not to license

Though the immediate goals of the plaintiffs are to get the AI companies to cease training and pay damages, chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America Mitch Glazier is already looking ahead toward a future of licensing. “As in the past, music creators will enforce their rights to protect the creative engine of human artistry and enable the development of a healthy and sustainable licensed market that recognizes the value of both creativity and technology,” he wrote in a recent op-ed in Billboard.

Such a market for licenses could mirror what has already unfolded for text generators. OpenAI has struck licensing deals with a number of news publishers, including Politico, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. The deals promise to make content from the publishers discoverable in OpenAI’s products, though the ability for the models to transparently cite where they’re getting information from is limited at best.

If AI music companies follow that pattern, the only ones with the means to create powerful music models might be those with the most cash. That’s perhaps exactly what YouTube is thinking. The company did not immediately respond to questions from MIT Technology Review about the details of its negotiations, but given the massive amount of data required to train AI models and the concentration of rights owners in music, it’s fair to assume the price of deals with record labels would be eye-popping. 

In theory, an AI company could bypass the licensing process altogether by building its model exclusively on music in the public domain, but it would be a herculean task. There have been similar efforts in the realm of text and image generators, including a legal consultancy in Chicago that created a model trained on dense regulatory documents, and a model from Hugging Face that trained on images of Mickey Mouse from the 1920s. But the models are small and unremarkable. If Suno or Udio is forced to train on only what’s in the public domain—think military march music and the royalty-free songs found in corporate videos—the resulting model would be a far cry from what they have today.

If AI companies do move forward with licensing agreements, negotiations may be tricky, says Grimmelmann. Music licensing is complicated by the fact that two different copyrights are at play: one for the song, which generally covers the composition, like the music and lyrics; and one for the master, which covers the recording, like what you’d hear if you stream the song. 

Some artists, like Taylor Swift and Frank Ocean, have come to own the masters of their catalogs after drawn-out legal battles, and would therefore be in the driver’s seat for any potential licensing deal. Many others, though, retain only the song copyright, while the record labels retain the masters. In these cases, the record label might theoretically be able to grant AI companies a license to use the music without an artist’s permission, but doing so could risk burning relationships with artists and sparking more legal battles. 

The question of whether to license their music to such companies has divided musician groups. In contract rules adopted in April by SAG-AFTRA, which represents recording artists as well as actors, AI clones of member voices are allowed, though there are minimum rates for compensation. Back in December, a group called the Indie Musician’s Caucus expressed frustrations that the leading instrumental musicians’ union, the 70,000-member American Federation of Musicians (AFM), was not doing enough to protect its rank and file against AI companies in contracts. The caucus wrote that it would vote against any agreement “obligating AFM members to dig [their] own graves by participating—without a right to consent, compensation, or credit—in the training of our permanent Generative AI replacements.”

But at this point, AFM does not appear eager to facilitate any deals. I asked Kenneth Shirk, international secretary-treasurer at AFM, whether he thought musicians should engage with AI companies and push to be fairly compensated, whatever that means, or instead resist licensing deals completely. 

“Looking at those questions makes me think, would you rather have a swarm of fire ants crawling all over you, or roll around in a bed of broken glass?” he told me. “We want musicians to get paid. But we also want to ensure that there’s a career in music to be had for those that are going to come after us.”

Supershoes are reshaping distance running

Since 2016, when Nike introduced the Vaporfly, a paradigm-­shifting shoe that helped athletes run more efficiently (and therefore faster), the elite running world has muddled through a period of soul-searching over the impact of high-tech footwear on the sport.

“Supershoes” —which combine a lightweight, energy-­returning foam with a carbon-fiber plate for stiffness—have been behind every broken world record in distances from 5,000 meters to the marathon since 2020.

To some, this is a sign of progress. In much of the world, elite running lacks a widespread following. Record-breaking adds a layer of excitement. And the shoes have benefits beyond the clock: most important, they help minimize wear on the body and enable faster recovery from hard workouts and races.

Still, some argue that they’ve changed the sport too quickly. Read the full story. 

—Jonathan W. Rosen

This story is from the forthcoming print issue of MIT Technology Review, which explores the theme of Play. It’s set to launch tomorrow, so if you don’t already, subscribe now to get a copy when it lands.

Why China’s dominance in commercial drones has become a global security issue

Whether you’ve flown a drone before or not, you’ve probably heard of DJI, or at least seen its logo. With more than a 90% share of the global consumer market, this Shenzhen-based company’s drones are used by hobbyists and businesses alike for everything from photography to spraying pesticides to moving parcels.

But on June 14, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would completely ban DJI’s drones from being sold in the US. The bill is now being discussed in the Senate as part of the annual defense budget negotiations. 

To understand why, you need to consider the potential for conflict between China and Taiwan, and the fact that the military implications of DJI’s commercial drones have become a top policy concern for US lawmakers. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

This story is from China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The EU has issued antitrust charges against Microsoft 
For bundling Teams with Office—just a day after it announced similar charges against Apple. (WSJ $) 
+ It seems likely it’ll be hit with a gigantic fine. (Ars Technica)
+ The EU has new powers to regulate the tech sector, and it’s clearly not afraid to use them. (FT $)

2 OpenAI is delaying launching its voice assistant 
 (WP $)
+ It’s also planning to block access in China—but plenty of Chinese companies stand ready to fill the void. (Mashable)

3 Deepfake creators are re-victimizing sex trafficking survivors
Non-consensual deepfake porn is proliferating at a terrifying pace—but this is the grimmest example I’ve seen. (Wired $)
+ Three ways we can fight deepfake porn. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Chinese tech company IPOs are a rarity these days
It’s becoming very hard to avoid the risk of it all being derailed by political scrutiny, whether at home or abroad. (NYT $)
+ Global chip company stock prices have been on a rollercoaster ride recently, thanks to Nvidia. (CNBC)

5 Why AI is not about to replace journalism
It can crank out content, sure—but it’s incredibly boring to read. (404 Media)
+ After all the hype, it’s no wonder lots of us feel ever-so-slightly disappointed by AI. (WP $)
+ Despite a troubled launch, Google’s already extending AI Summaries to Gmail as well as Search. (CNET) 

6 This week of extreme weather is a sign of things to come
Summers come with a side-serving of existential dread now, as we all feel the effects of climate change. (NBC)
+ Scientists have spotted a worrying new tipping point for the loss of ice sheets in Antarctica. (The Guardian) 

7 Inside the fight over lithium mine expansion in Argentina 
Indigenous communities had been divided in opposition—but as the cash started flowing, cracks started appearing. (The Guardian)
+ Lithium battery fires are a growing concern for firefighters worldwide. (WSJ $)

8 What even is intelligent life?
We value it, but it’s a slippery concept that’s almost impossible to define. (Aeon) 
+ What an octopus’s mind can teach us about AI’s ultimate mystery. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Tesla is recalling most Cybertrucks… for the fourth time 
You have to laugh, really. (The Verge) 
+ Luckily, it’s not sold that many of them anyway. (Quartz $)

10 The trouble with Meta’s “smart” Ray Bans 
Well… basically they’re just not very smart. At all. (Wired $)

Quote of the day

“We’re making the biggest bet in AI. If transformers go away, we’ll die. But if they stick around, we’re the biggest company of all time.”

—Fighting talk to CNBC from Gavin Uberti, cofounder and CEO of a two-year-old startup called Etched, which believes its AI-optimized chips could take on Nvidia’s near-monopoly.

The big story

This nanoparticle could be the key to a universal covid vaccine

COURTESY OF WELLCOME LEAP, CALTECH, AND MERKIN INSTITUTE

September 2022
Long before Alexander Cohen—or anyone else—had heard of the alpha, delta, or omicron variants of covid-19, he and his graduate school advisor Pamela Bjorkman were doing the research that might soon make it possible for a single vaccine to defeat the rapidly evolving virus—along with any other covid-19 variant that might arise in the future.

The pair and their collaborators are now tantalizingly close to achieving their goal of manufacturing a vaccine that broadly triggers an immune response not just to covid and its variants but to a wider variety of coronaviruses. Read the full story.

—Adam Piore

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Happy 80th Birthday to much beloved Muswell Hillbilly Ray Davies, frontman of the Kinks.
+ Need to cool your home down? Plants can help!
+ Well, uh, that’s certainly one way to cope with a long-haul flight. 
+ Glad to know I’m not the only person obsessed with Nongshim instant noodles. 

Whether you’ve flown a drone before or not, you’ve probably heard of DJI, or at least seen its logo. With more than a 90% share of the global consumer market, this Shenzhen-based company’s drones are used by hobbyists and businesses alike for photography and surveillance, as well as for spraying pesticides, moving parcels, and many other purposes around the world.  

But on June 14, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would completely ban DJI’s drones from being sold in the US. The bill is now being discussed in the Senate as part of the annual defense budget negotiations. 

The reason? While its market dominance has attracted scrutiny for years, it’s increasingly clear that DJI’s commercial products are so good and affordable they are also being used on active battlefields to scout out the enemy or carry bombs. As the US worries about the potential for conflict between China and Taiwan, the military implications of DJI’s commercial drones are becoming a top policy concern.

DJI has managed to set the gold standard for commercial drones because it is built on decades of electronic manufacturing prowess and policy support in Shenzhen. It is an example of how China’s manufacturing advantage can turn into a technological one.

“I’ve been to the DJI factory many times … and mainly, China’s industrial base is so deep that every component ends up being a fraction of the cost,” Sam Schmitz, the mechanical engineering lead at Neuralink, wrote on X. Shenzhen and surrounding towns have had a robust factory scene for decades, providing an indispensable supply chain for a hardware industry like drones. “This factory made almost everything, and it’s surrounded by thousands of factories that make everything else … nowhere else in the world can you run out of some weird screw and just walk down the street until you find someone selling thousands of them,” he wrote.

But Shenzhen’s municipal government has also significantly contributed to the industry. For example, it has granted companies more permission for potentially risky experiments and set up subsidies and policy support. Last year, I visited Shenzhen to experience how it’s already incorporating drones in everyday food delivery, but the city is also working with companies to use drones for bigger and bigger jobs—carrying everything from packages to passengers. All of these go into a plan to build up the “low-altitude economy” in Shenzhen that keeps the city on the leading edge of drone technology.

As a result, the supply chain in Shenzhen has become so competitive that the world can’t really use drones without it. Chinese drones are simply the most accessible and affordable out there. 

Most recently, DJI’s drones have been used by both sides in the Ukraine-Russia conflict for reconnaissance and bombing. Some American companies tried to replace DJI’s role, but their drones were more expensive and their performance unsatisfactory. And even as DJI publicly suspended its businesses in Russia and Ukraine and said it would terminate any reseller relationship if its products were found to be used for military purposes, the Ukrainian army is still assembling its own drones with parts sourced from China.

This reliance on one Chinese company and the supply chain behind it is what worries US politicians, but the danger would be more pronounced in any conflict between China and Taiwan, a prospect that is a huge security concern in the US and globally.

Last week, my colleague James O’Donnell wrote about a report by the think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) that analyzed the role of drones in a potential war in the Taiwan Strait. Right now, both Ukraine and Russia are still finding ways to source drones or drone parts from Chinese companies, but it’d be much harder for Taiwan to do so, since it would be in China’s interest to block its opponent’s supply. “So Taiwan is effectively cut off from the world’s foremost commercial drone supplier and must either make its own drones or find alternative manufacturers, likely in the US,” James wrote.

If the ban on DJI sales in the US is eventually passed, it will hit the company hard for sure, as the US drone market is currently worth an estimated $6 billion, the majority of which is going to DJI. But undercutting DJI’s advantage won’t magically grow an alternative drone industry outside China. 

“The actions taken against DJI suggest protectionism and undermine the principles of fair competition and an open market. The Countering CCP Drones Act risks setting a dangerous precedent, where unfounded allegations dictate public policy, potentially jeopardizing the economic well-being of the US,” DJI told MIT Technology Review in an emailed statement.

The Taiwanese government is aware of the risks of relying too much on China’s drone industry, and it’s looking to change. In March, Taiwan’s newly elected president, Lai Ching-te, said that Taiwan wants to become the “Asian center for the democratic drone supply chain.” 

Already the hub of global semiconductor production, Taiwan seems well positioned to grow another hardware industry like drones, but it will probably still take years or even decades to build the economies of scale seen in Shenzhen. With support from the US, can Taiwanese companies really grow fast enough to meaningfully sway China’s control of the industry? That’s a very open question.

A housekeeping note: I’m currently visiting London, and the newsletter will take a break next week. If you are based in the UK and would like to meet up, let me know by writing to zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. ByteDance is working with the US chip design company Broadcom to develop a five-nanometer AI chip. This US-China collaboration, which should be compliant with US export restrictions, is rare these days given the political climate. (Reuters $)

2. After both the European Union and China announced new tariffs against each other, the two sides agreed to chat about how to resolve the dispute. (New York Times $)

• Canada is preparing to announce its own tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles. (Bloomberg $)

3. A NASA leader says the US is “on schedule” to send astronauts to the moon within a few years. There’s currently a heated race between the US and China on moon exploration. (Washington Post $)

4. A new cybersecurity report says RedJuliett, a China-backed hacker group, has intensified attacks on Taiwanese organizations this year. (Al Jazeera $)

5. The Canadian government is blocking a rare earth mine from being sold to a Chinese company. Instead, the government will buy the stockpiled rare earth materials for $2.2 million. (Bloomberg $)

6. Economic hardship at home has pushed some Chinese small investors to enter the US marijuana industry. They have been buying lands in the States, setting up marijuana farms, and hiring other new Chinese immigrants. (NPR)

Lost in translation

In the past week, the most talked-about person in China has been a 17-year-old girl named Jiang Ping, according to the Chinese publication Southern Metropolis Daily. Every year since 2018, the Chinese company Alibaba has been hosting a global mathematics contest that attracts students from prestigious universities around the world to compete for a generous prize. But to everyone’s surprise, Jiang, who’s studying fashion design at a vocational high school in a poor town in eastern China, ended up ranking 12th in the qualifying round this year, beating scores of college undergraduate or even master’s students. Other than reading college mathematics textbooks under her math teacher’s guidance, Jiang has received no professional training, as many of her competitors have.

Jiang’s story, highlighted by Alibaba following the announcement of the first-round results, immediately went viral in China. While some saw it as a tale of buried talents and how personal endeavor can overcome unfavorable circumstances, others questioned the legitimacy of her results. She became so famous that people, including social media influencers, kept visiting her home, turning her hometown into an unlikely tourist destination. The town had to hide Jiang from public attention while she prepared for the final round of the competition.

One more thing

After I wrote about the new Chinese generative video model Kling last week, the AI tool added a new feature that can turn a static photo into a short video clip. Well, what better way to test its performance than feeding it the iconic “distracted boyfriend” meme and watching what the model predicts will happen after that moment?

Update: The story has been updated to include a statement from DJI.

Although significant attention has been devoted to launching spacecraft into space, the idea of what to do with their remains has been largely ignored. Many previous missions did not have an exit strategy. Instead of being pushed into orbits where they could reenter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up, satellites were simply left in orbit at the ends of their lives, creating debris that must be monitored and, if possible, maneuvered around to avoid a collision. “For the last 60 years, we’ve been using [space] as if it were an infinite resource,” Lemmens says. “But particularly in the last 10 years, it has become rather clear that this is not the case.” 

Engineering the ins and outs: Step one in reducing orbital clutter—or, colloquially, space trash—is designing spacecraft that safely leave space when their missions are complete. “I thought naïvely, as a student, ‘How hard can that be?’” says Lemmens. The answer turned out to be more complicated than he expected. 

At ESA, he works with scientists and engineers on specific missions to devise good approaches. Some incorporate propulsion that works reliably even decades after launch; others involve designing systems that can move spacecraft to keep them from colliding with other satellites and with space debris. They also work on plans to get the remains through the atmosphere without large risks to aviation and infrastructure.

Standardizing space: Earth’s atmosphere exerts a drag on satellites that will eventually pull them out of orbit. National and international guidelines recommend that satellites lower their altitude at the end of their operational lives so that they will reenter the atmosphere and make this possible. Previously the goal was for this to take 25 years at most; Lemmens and his peers now suggest five years or less, a time frame that would have to be taken into account from the start of mission planning and design. 

Explaining the need for this change in policy can feel a bit like preaching, Lemmens says, and it’s his least favorite part of the job. It’s a challenge, he says, to persuade people not to think of the vastness of space as “an infinite amount of orbits.” Without change, the amount of space debris may create a serious problem in the coming decades, cluttering orbits and increasing the number of collisions.  

Shaping the future: Lemmens says his wish is for his job to become unnecessary in the future, but with around 11,500 satellites and over 35,000 debris objects being tracked, and more launches planned, that seems unlikely to happen. 

Researchers are looking into more drastic changes to the way space missions are run. We might one day, for instance, be able to dismantle satellites and find ways to recycle their components in orbit. Such an approach isn’t likely to be used anytime soon, Lemmens says. But he is encouraged that more spacecraft designers are thinking about sustainability: “Ideally, this becomes the normal in the sense that this becomes a standard engineering practice that you just think of when you’re designing your spacecraft.”

Before the internet, Americans may have interacted with the federal government by stepping into grand buildings adorned with impressive stone columns and gleaming marble floors. Today, the neoclassical architecture of those physical spaces has been (at least partially) replaced by the digital architecture of website design—HTML code, tables, forms, and buttons. 

While people visiting a government website to apply for student loans, research veterans’ benefits, or enroll in Medicare might not notice these digital elements, they play a crucial role. If a website is buggy or doesn’t work on a phone, taxpayers may not be able to access the services they have paid for—which can create a negative impression of the government itself.  

There are about 26,000 federal websites in the US. Early on, each site had its own designs, fonts, and log-in systems, creating frustration for the public and wasting government resources. The troubled launch of Healthcare.gov in 2013 highlighted the need for a better way to build government digital services. In 2014, President Obama created two new teams to help improve government tech.

Within the General Services Administration (GSA), a new team called 18F (named for its office at 1800 F Street in Washington, DC) was created to “collaborate with other agencies to fix technical problems, build products, and improve public service through technology.” The team was built to move at the speed of tech startups rather than lumbering bureaucratic agencies. 

The US Digital Service (USDS) was set up “to deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design.” In 2015, the two teams collaborated to build the US Web Design System (USWDS), a style guide and collection of user interface components and design patterns intended to ensure accessibility and a consistent user experience across government websites. “Inconsistency is felt, even if not always precisely articulated in usability research findings,” Dan Williams, the USWDS program lead, said in an email. 

Today, the system defines 47 user interface components such as buttons, alerts, search boxes, and forms, each with design examples, sample code, and guidelines such as “Be polite” and “Don’t overdo it.” Now in its third iteration, it is used in 160 government websites. “As of September 2023, 94 agencies use USWDS code, and it powers about 1.1 billion page views on federal websites,” says Williams.

To ensure clear and consistent typography, the free and open-source typeface Public Sans was created for the US government in 2019. “It started as a design experiment,” says Williams, who designed the typeface. “We were interested in trying to establish an open-source solution space for a typeface, just like we had for the other design elements in the design system.”

The teams behind Public Sans and the USWDS embrace transparency and collaboration with government agencies and the public.

And to ensure that the hard-learned lessons aren’t forgotten, the projects embrace continuous improvement. One of the design principles behind Public Sans offers key guidance in this area: “Strive to be better, not necessarily perfect.”

Jon Keegan writes Beautiful Public Data, a newsletter that curates visually interesting data sets collected by local, state, and federal government agencies
(beautifulpublicdata.com).

W.W. NORTON, 2024

Cloud problems offer no such assurances. They are inherently complex and unpredictable, and they usually have social, psychological, or political dimensions. Because of their dynamic, shape-shifting nature, trying to “fix” a cloud problem often ends up creating several new problems. For this reason, they don’t have a definitive “solved” state—only good and bad (or better and worse) outcomes. Trying to repair a broken-down car is a clock problem. Trying to solve traffic is a cloud problem.  

Engineers are renowned clock-problem solvers. They’re also notorious for treating every problem like a clock. Increasing specialization and cultural expectations play a role in this tendency. But so do engineers themselves, who are typically the ones who get to frame the problems they’re trying to solve in the first place. 

In his latest book, Wicked Problems, Guru Madhavan argues that the growing number of cloudy problems in our world demands a broader, more civic-minded approach to engineering. “Wickedness” is Madhavan’s way of characterizing what he calls “the cloudiest of problems.” It’s a nod to a now-famous coinage by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who used the term “wicked” to describe complex social problems that resisted the rote scientific and engineering-based (i.e., clock-like) approaches that were invading their fields of design and urban planning back in the 1970s. 

Madhavan, who’s the senior director of programs at the National Academy of Engineering, is no stranger to wicked problems himself. He’s tackled such daunting examples as trying to make prescription drugs more affordable in the US and prioritizing development of new vaccines. But the book isn’t about his own work. Instead, Wicked Problems weaves together the story of a largely forgotten aviation engineer and inventor, Edwin A. Link, with case studies of man-made and natural disasters that Madhavan uses to explain how wicked problems take shape in society and how they might be tamed.

Link’s story, for those who don’t know it, is fascinating—he was responsible for building the first mechanical flight trainer, using parts from his family’s organ factory—and Madhavan gives a rich and detailed accounting. The challenges this inventor faced in the 1920s and ’30s—which included figuring out how tens of thousands of pilots could quickly and effectively be trained to fly without putting all of them up in the air (and in danger), as well as how to instill trust in “instrument flying” when pilots’ instincts frequently told them their instruments were wrong—were among the quintessential wicked problems of his time. 

To address a world full of wicked problems, we’re going to need a more expansive and inclusive idea of what engineering is and who gets to participate in it.

Unfortunately, while Link’s biography and many of the interstitial chapters on disasters, like Boston’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919, are interesting and deeply researched, Wicked Problems suffers from some wicked structural choices. 

The book’s elaborate conceptual framework and hodgepodge of narratives feel both fussy and unnecessary, making a complex and nuanced topic even more difficult to grasp at times. In the prologue alone, readers must bounce from the concept of cloud problems to that of wicked problems, which get broken down into hard, soft, and messy problems, which are then reconstituted in different ways and linked to six attributes—efficiency, vagueness, vulnerability, safety, maintenance, and resilience—that, together, form what Madhavan calls a “concept of operations,” which is the primary organizational tool he uses to examine wicked problems.

It’s a lot—or at least enough to make you wonder whether a “systems engineering” approach was the correct lens through which to examine wickedness. It’s also unfortunate because Madhavan’s ultimate argument is an important one, particularly in an age of rampant solutionism and “one neat trick” approaches to complex problems. To effectively address a world full of wicked problems, he says, we’re going to need a more expansive and inclusive idea of what engineering is and who gets to participate in it.  

MIT PRESS, 2024

While John Downer would likely agree with that sentiment, his new book, Rational Accidents, makes a strong argument that there are hard limits to even the best and broadest engineering approaches. Similarly set in the world of aviation, Downer’s book explores a fundamental paradox at the heart of today’s civil aviation industry: the fact that flying is safer and more reliable than should technically be possible.

Jetliners are an example of what Downer calls a “catastrophic technology.” These are “complex technological systems that require extraordinary, and historically unprecedented, failure rates—of the order of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of operational hours between catastrophic failures.”

Take the average modern jetliner, with its 7 million components and 170 miles’ worth of wiring—an immensely complex system in and of itself. There were over 25,000 jetliners in regular service in 2014, according to Downer. Together, they averaged 100,000 flights every single day. Now consider that in 2017, no passenger-carrying commercial jetliner was involved in a fatal accident. Zero. That year, passenger totals reached 4 billion on close to 37 million flights. Yes, it was a record-setting year for the airline industry, safety-wise, but flying remains an almost unfathomably safe and reliable mode of transportation—even with Boeing’s deadly 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 and the company’s ongoing troubles. 

Downer, a professor of science and technology studies at the University of Bristol, does an excellent job in the first half of the book dismantling the idea that we can objectively recognize, understand, and therefore control all risk involved in such complex technologies. Using examples from well-known jetliner crashes, as well as from the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, he shows why there are simply too many scenarios and permutations of failure for us to assess or foresee such risks, even with today’s sophisticated modeling techniques and algorithmic assistance.

So how does the airline industry achieve its seemingly unachievable record of safety and reliability? It’s not regulation, Downer says. Instead, he points to three unique factors. First is the massive service experience the industry has amassed. Over the course of 70 years, manufacturers have built tens of thousands of jetliners, which have failed (and continue to fail) in all sorts of unpredictable ways. 

This deep and constantly growing data set, combined with the industry’s commitment to thoroughly investigating each and every failure, lets it generalize the lessons learned across the entire industry—the second key to understanding jetliner reliability. 

Finally is what might be the most interesting and counterintuitive factor: Downer argues that the lack of innovation in jetliner design is an essential but overlooked part of the reliability record. The fact that the industry has been building what are essentially iterations of the same jetliner for 70 years ensures that lessons learned from failures are perpetually relevant as well as generalizable, he says. 

That extremely cautious relationship to change flies in the face of the innovate-or-die ethos that drives most technology companies today. And yet it allows the airline industry to learn from decades of failures and continue to chip away at the future “failure performance” of jetliners.

The bad news is that the lessons in jetliner reliability aren’t transferable to other catastrophic technologies. “It is an irony of modernity that the only catastrophic technology with which we have real experience, the jetliner, is highly unrepresentative, and yet it reifies a misleading perception of mastery over catastrophic technologies in general,” writes Downer.

For instance, to make nuclear reactors as reliable as jetliners, that industry would need to commit to one common reactor design, build tens of thousands of reactors, operate them for decades, suffer through thousands of catastrophes, slowly accumulate lessons and insights from those catastrophes, and then use them to refine that common reactor design.  

This obviously won’t happen. And yet “because we remain entranced by the promise of implausible reliability, and implausible certainty about that reliability, our appetite for innovation has outpaced our insight and humility,” writes Downer. With the age of catastrophic technologies still in its infancy, our continued survival may very well hinge not on innovating our way out of cloudy or wicked problems, but rather on recognizing, and respecting, what we don’t know and can probably never understand.  

If Wicked Problems and Rational Accidents are about the challenges and limits of trying to understand complex systems using objective science- and engineering-based methods, Georgina Voss’s new book, Systems Ultra, provides a refreshing alternative. Rather than dispassionately trying to map out or make sense of complex systems from the outside, Voss—a writer, artist, and researcher—uses her book to grapple with what they feel like, and ultimately what they mean, from the inside.

VERSO, 2024

“There is something rather wonderful about simply feeling our way through these enormous structures,” she writes before taking readers on a whirlwind tour of systems visible and unseen, corrupt and benign, ancient and new. Stops include the halls of hype at Las Vegas’s annual Consumer Electronics Show (“a hot mess of a Friday casual hellscape”), the “memetic gold mine” that was the container ship Ever Given and the global supply chain it broke when it got stuck in the Suez Canal, and the payment systems that undergird the porn industry. 

For Voss, systems are both structure and behavior. They are relational technologies that are “defined by their ability to scale and, perhaps more importantly, their peculiar relationship to scale.” She’s also keenly aware of the pitfalls of using an “experiential” approach to make sense of these large-scale systems. “Verbal attempts to neatly encapsulate what a system is can feel like a stoner monologue with pointed hand gestures (‘Have you ever thought about how electricity is, like, really big?’),” she writes. 

Nevertheless, her written attempts are a delight to read. Voss manages to skillfully unpack the power structures that make up, and reinforce, the large-scale systems we live in. Along the way, she also dispels many of the stories we’re told about their inscrutability and inevitability. That she does all this with humor, intelligence, and a boundless sense of curiosity makes Systems Ultra both a shining example of the “civic engagement as engineering” approach that Madhavan argues for in Wicked Problems, and proof that his argument is spot on. 

Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California.

While Sumners focused on physics, she was onto something bigger. Over the last several decades, evidence has emerged that childhood play can shape our future selves: the skills we develop, the professions we choose, our sense of self-worth, and even our relationships.

That doesn’t mean we should foist “educational” toys like telescopes or tiny toolboxes on kids to turn them into astronomers or carpenters. As Sumners explained, even “fun” toys offer opportunities to discover the basic principles of physics. 

According to Jacqueline Harding, a child development expert and author of The Brain That Loves to Play, “If you invest time in play, which helps with executive functioning, decision-making, resilience—all those things—then it’s going to propel you into a much more safe, secure space in the future.”

Sumners was focused mostly on hard skills, the scientific knowledge that toys and games can foster. But there are soft skills, too, like creativity, problem-­solving, teamwork, and empathy. According to Harding, the less structure there is to such play—the fewer rules and goals—the more these soft skills emerge.

“The kinds of playthings, or play activities, that really produce creative thought,” she says, “are natural materials, with no defined end to them—like clay, paint, water, and mud—so that there is no right or wrong way of playing with it.” 

Playing is by definition voluntary, spontaneous, and goal-free; it involves taking risks, testing boundaries, and experimenting. The best kind of play results in joyful discovery, and along the way, the building blocks of innovation and personal development take shape. But in the decades since Sumners wrote her story, the landscape of play has shifted considerably. Recent research by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Early Childhood suggests that digital games and virtual play don’t appear to confer the same developmental benefits as physical games and outdoor play. 

“The brain loves the rewards that are coming from digital media,” says Harding. But in screen-based play, “you’re not getting that autonomy.” The lack of physical interaction also concerns her: “It is the quality of human face-to-face interaction, body proximity, eye-to-eye gaze, and mutual engagement in a play activity that really makes a difference.”

Bill Gourgey is a science writer based in Washington, DC.

So what happens to us as we grow older? Children begin to compete with each other by age four or five. Play begins to transform from something we do purely for fun into something we use to achieve status and rank ourselves against other people. We play to score points. We play to win. 

And with that, play starts to become something different. Not that it can’t still be fun and joyful! Even watching other people play will bring us joy. We enjoy watching other people play so much and get so much joy by proxy from watching their achievements that we spend massive amounts of money to do so. According to StubHub, the average price of a ticket to the Super Bowl this year was $8,600. The average price for a Super Bowl ad was a cool $7 million this year, according to Ad Age. 

This kind of interest doesn’t just apply to physical games. Video-game streaming has long been a mainstay on YouTube, and entire industries have risen up around it. Top streamers on Twitch—Amazon’s livestreaming service, which is heavily gaming focused—earn upwards of $100,000 per month. And the global market for video games themselves is projected to bring in some $282 billion in revenue this year. 

Simply put, play is serious business. 

There are fortunes to be had in making our play more appealing, more accessible, more fun. All of the features in this issue dig in on the enormous amount of research and development that goes into making play “better.”  

On our cover this month is executive editor Niall Firth’s feature on the ways AI is going to upend game development. As you will read, we are about to enter the Wild West—Red Dead or not—of game character development. How will games change when they become less predictable and more fully interactive, thanks to AI-driven nonplayer characters who can not only go off script but even continue to play with each other when we’re not there? Will these even be games anymore, or will we simply be playing around in experiences? What kinds of parasocial relationships will we develop in these new worlds? It’s a fascinating read. 

There is no sport more intimately connected to the ocean, and to water, than surfing. It’s pure play on top of the waves. And when you hear surfers talk about entering the flow state, this is very much the same kind of state children experience at play—intensely focused, losing all sense of time and the world around them. Finding that flow no longer means living by the water’s edge, Eileen Guo reports. At surf pools all over the world, we’re piping water into (or out of) deserts to create perfect waves hundreds of miles from the ocean. How will that change the sport, and at what environmental cost? 

Just as we can make games more interesting, or bring the ocean to the desert, we have long pushed the limits of how we can make our bodies better, faster, stronger. Among the most recent ways we have done this is with the advent of so-called supershoes—running shoes with rigid carbon-fiber plates and bouncy proprietary foams. The late Kelvin Kiptum utterly destroyed the men’s world record for the marathon last year wearing a pair of supershoes made by Nike, clocking in at a blisteringly hot 2:00:35. Jonathan W. Rosen explores the science and technology behind these shoes and how they are changing the sport, especially in Kenya. 

There’s plenty more, too. So I hope you enjoy the Play issue. We certainly put a lot of work into it. But of course, what fun is play if you don’t put in the work?

Thanks for reading,

Mat Honan

When Allan Gottlieb ’67 began editing the Puzzle Corner column in 1966, he was a junior at MIT, majoring in math. Little did he know then that he was undertaking a project that would last for nearly six decades. If you missed our previous celebrations of Allan, read our 2015 profile, “Puzzle Corner’s Keeper,” and watch the MIT Alumni Association’s video “The Puzzle Guy” from his 50th reunion.

Although her parents’ lives were spared, her father, a biology professor, died of cancer three years later. When her mother, a chemist, got a job as head of a food quality laboratory in Łódź, she eventually had to place Elizabeth in the care of nuns in the countryside, 11 miles away. From ages six through nine, she lived with about 30 other half-orphans and orphans, without running water or electricity or personal attention, taking an hour-long train ride to see her mother on weekends.    

It was a childhood, she says, of “tremendous stress.” 

So perhaps it’s no accident that as an adult, Sajdel-Sulkowska was drawn to the study of stress—whether caused by burns, altered gravity, chemical pollutants, or bacterial infection—and its effect on brain development. In the course of her 57-year career, she has published more than 100 papers, chronicling her research in cells, in animal models, and with postmortem human brain tissue. She has studied the interactions between neurons and the glial cells that protect and support them, the changes in RNA transcription during brain development and in Alzheimer’s disease, and the role of the thyroid hormone in brain development, and published literature reviews on the role of the gut microbiome and gut-brain axis in autism and covid.

As a child, Sajdel-Sulkowska would tell anyone who asked that when she grew up, she wanted to be a professor like her father. At 10, she returned from the orphanage to live with her mother, who had remarried, and she eventually attended an all-girls high school in Łódź. When her metallurgist cousin Witold Vatha Kosicki, SM ’29, learned of her interest in science, he invited her to visit the US so she could interview at MIT, a school she’d never heard of. Getting accepted to Warsaw University’s highly competitive department of mathematics and physics helped her qualify for a visa to the US—and convinced MIT that she was qualified to attend the Institute. After arriving in the US in 1962 and completing a six-week English course (“I barely passed it,” she confesses), she started at the Institute in the spring semester of 1963.

At MIT, Sajdel-Sulkowska planned to study nuclear physics until she took a course on DNA and RNA with Gene Brown, a professor of biochemistry and a pioneer in the field of metabolism. The material was so new there wasn’t even a textbook. But Brown’s lecture on the discovery of the double helix inspired her to switch to biology. “It was fascinating,” she says. “The lectures were so incredible—I knew I wasn’t going back to physics.”

COURTESY OF ELIZABETH SAJDEL-SULKOWSKA

COURTESY OF ELIZABETH SAJDEL-SULKOWSKA

Sajdel-Sulkowska’s cousin had provided money for her to attend MIT for one semester. “The rest of it had to be kind of patched,” she says. So she washed dishes in the chemistry department, plotted soil stress on graph paper in the mechanical engineering department, collected animal urine samples, and for one year worked as an au pair.

During most of her time at MIT, Sajdel-Sulkowska lived with her mother, who had come with her to the US and worked as a technician in a medical lab on Ames Street. They initially lived on Beacon Street in Boston, in a basement room with exposed pipes and wires, sharing a bathroom with other families. But her advisor, Margaret Freeman of the Russian studies department, visited one day and was so appalled at the conditions that she invited Sajdel-Sulkowska and her mother to stay at her home in Belmont. Then, midway through her undergraduate career, she spent a year in McCormick Hall, which had opened in 1963.

Sajdel-Sulkowska’s time in McCormick was a “turning point,” she says. When she lived off campus, she studied and worked on her problem sets alone and assumed everyone else was doing the same. Her isolation was exacerbated by the language barrier, and she felt even more alone in the face of male peers brimming with confidence, relatives suggesting she switch to secretarial school, and an instructor who told her, after a bad experience with a rat in an animal laboratory class, that MIT was not the place for her. At McCormick, she says, she learned that “not everybody knows everything” and that “there are people helping you—that you don’t have to do it all yourself.”

Her first paper on stress was published in 1969, 16 years after the double-helix structure of DNA was discovered. At the time, the finding that stress could alter the body at a cellular level was a revelation.

Sajdel-Sulkowska started her career at a time when there were very few women in science. Though MIT began formally accepting women in 1882, she was one of only two or three women earning a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1967; her entire class of more than 900 had only 20 to 30 women.

Being one of those few women was not easy. In the 1960s and ’70s, when she continued at MIT for graduate school, the field of biology had a culture of what she calls “unchecked harassment.” There was no way to complain without retribution. “That kind of culture created intimidation,” she says. “If you go through incidents of harassment, you become more vigilant.” Male colleagues had to be treated as male colleagues, not as colleagues. Still, she says, there were “a lot of helpful people.”

Many of those helpful people were those she encountered in the Margaret Cheney Room, a Building 3 sanctuary for female students complete with a bedroom, shower, and telephone booths. “That was a haven,” she says—a place where she made lifelong friends. It was also there that she wrote her doctoral thesis—longhand, with her husky, Amis, at her side, over the course of three months. She would write for three hours, sleep for 20 minutes, and repeat.

Sajdel-Sulkowska earned an SM in nutrition and food science (or, as she calls it, “eukaryotic biology in disguise”) and an ScD in the same subject with a minor in neuroendocrinology. Her graduate work would be her first foray into the study of stress as she examined DNA-dependent RNA polymerase II, an enzyme that copies DNA into RNA, and its regulation by cortisol, the stress hormone. Through studies in rat liver cells and then, after a nudge from her committee, in live rats, she found that there is a physiological response to stress through regulation of RNA transcription. Her research showed that artificial cortisol injected into rats altered the RNA polymerase enzymes that synthesize the RNA component of ribosomes. Those ribosomes in turn synthesize the proteins that carry out functions in the cell. 

Her first paper on this work was published in 1969, 16 years after the double­helix structure of DNA was discovered; a second paper followed in 1971. At the time, the finding that stress could alter the body at a cellular level was a revelation.

It was an exhilarating time to be studying biology, says Sajdel-Sulkowska; while she was working on her doctorate, researchers at MIT, Caltech, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, discovered reverse transcriptase, the enzyme that copies RNA into DNA (the counterpart to the RNA polymerases she studied), for which they would later earn a Nobel Prize. “I was working in the laboratory, I was in a great group, things were happening—it was exciting!” she says.

Reflecting on her time at MIT, Sajdel-Sulkowska says she loved the atmosphere (“I liked the fact that you could work late in the evening”) and the energy. The challenges she had to overcome to succeed at the Institute were worth it, she says: “I wanted to do it, and I did it.”

After earning her ScD in 1972, she interviewed for a faculty position at Northwestern University and was offered the job. But she had recently met Adam Sulkowski, a psychiatrist and postdoctoral fellow, who had just arrived from Poland via France on a visa sponsored by Boston University and could not relocate. She returned to Boston, they married that October, and she became a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis, where she continued to study RNA polymerase in yeast. Two years later, the first of their four sons was born.

Sajdel-Sulkowska carved out a career that was both broad and deep at a time when combining scientific work and motherhood was extremely rare and accommodations for US working mothers practically nonexistent. When her oldest son was born, in 1974, her three-month maternity leave was unpaid. After her second son arrived while she was completing another postdoc, at Shriners Burn Institute at Harvard Medical School (HMS), the cost of day care for two children exceeded her salary. So with no day care, her husband watched the two boys in the morning, and she found herself under a “tremendous amount of stress.”  

And at Shriners, stress was again the subject of her work. In guinea pigs that have suffered severe burns, she discovered, an increase in cortisol inhibits DNA synthesis in the thymus, which plays a key role in immune function. Her research revealed that removing burned tissue as soon as possible leads to a faster return to normal thymus function and a faster recovery from burns.

In 1980 she became a lecturer in the HMS department of psychiatry with an appointment at McLean Hospital, and she was named an assistant professor six years later. Over the next two decades, she would work on a wide range of topics, including the relationship between mercury and autism, the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease, and the role of the thyroid hormone in brain development. She balanced work and motherhood with the help of her mother and her husband, who was supportive and proud of her. “Where there is a will, there is a way,” she says.

In 1989, Sajdel-Sulkowska spent a sabbatical in the lab of Nobel laureate Walter Gilbert at Harvard, gaining experience in cloning, sequencing, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR)—a time she sees as another turning point in her career. In the Gilbert lab, which she describes as a large, vibrant group of young and older scientists, everyone’s work and opinion mattered. “We frequently met as a group and could freely discuss our experiments,” she says. The experience gave her confidence. “At that point I felt that I may be able to start something by myself,” she says.

Once back at HMS, she strove to create the same sort of atmosphere in her lab and began pursuing grants to fund more independent work. When inspiration struck for an especially ambitious research project a few years later, in 1998, Sajdel-Sulkowska embraced the challenge. She’d been watching Star Trek with her sons when she came up with the idea for an experiment examining the effect of yet another kind of stress: altered gravity. In recent NASA brain research on pregnant rats on the space shuttle Columbia, more than half of the rat pups had died. She wrote a grant proposal to work with NASA’s Ames Research Center to study altered gravity’s impact on rats’ brain development. For her study, she positioned pregnant rats in cages at different points on a 24-foot centrifuge, exposing them and their developing pups to varying levels of greater-than-Earth gravity for 42 days, through pregnancy and lactation. Then she measured the length of time the rat pups were able to stay on top of a motorized rotating cylinder (what’s known as a rotarod test) and discovered that hypergravity decreased motor function. Rat pups that developed at 1.65 times Earth gravity could only stay on the spinning wheel for as little as 10 seconds before falling off, while the pups that developed at Earth gravity were able to stay on for almost a minute. 

Her research suggested that this may be because the higher gravity increases oxidative stress (an excess accumulation of free radicals that can damage the body’s cells) or suppresses thyroid activity, a problem that she had previously found to decrease the mass of the developing cerebellum.She also showed that hypergravity decreases the number of a crucial type of neurons in that region of the brain, which is responsible for movement, among other functions.Curiously, she found that male developing brains were more sensitive to hypergravity than their female counterparts. At the end of the experiment, the cerebellums of the male pups were visibly smaller than normal. 

As her hypergravity research was underway, Sajdel-Sulkowska also examined the effect on brain development of another environmental stressor that had become pervasive: polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a group of toxic synthetic chemicals used so widely from the 1930s through the 1970s that they contaminated the air, water, and soil. She subjected rat pups that had been exposed to PCBs from before birth to rotarod tests and found that their performance decreased as well. So did the mass of their cerebellums, and as with hypergravity, the effect was greater in males than in females.

In 2010 Sajdel-Sulkowska, who had lost her husband to cancer in 2002, was devastated when her youngest son died at the age of 23 as he was recovering from an accident. Work would prove to be a lifeline. She moved back to Poland, where diving into new research “helped me survive,” she says. First as a visiting professor in veterinary medicine at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences and then teaching and doing research at the Medical University of Warsaw, she had an opportunity to work with many young scientists. Her research collaboration with Katarzyna Czarzasta, who is now an assistant professor at the Medical University of Warsaw, was particularly fruitful—and continues today. “She is a very good mentor,” says Czarzasta, who adds that she treated her students as equals.

While teaching in Poland, Sajdel-Sulkowska encountered many students who suffered from depression. “I also observed great stigma associated with psychiatric disorders in Poland, specifically with depression during pregnancy,” she says. That got her thinking about recent research on the use of probiotics—which are readily available in the grocery store—as an alternative treatment for depression. And that led to several projects on perinatal depression that she hoped would lay the groundwork for a study on probiotics as a treatment for it.

The differences in stress response between males and females are at least partly due to the sex hormones. Testosterone increases cortisol levels, so the stress response is greater in males.

In one, she applied chronic mild stress to rats just before pregnancy to model perinatal depression, which she verified by measuring cortisol levels and time spent grooming. Then she studied their pups and documented negative effects on their neurodevelopment and cardiac development. The effects differed in male and female offspring, and the sex-­dependent cardiovascular effects in females persisted as they aged, potentially affecting the following generation as well. The study added to the growing body of research showing that the impact of environment and behavior—also known as epigenetic effects—can be passed along to offspring. 

In the past, Sajdel-Sulkowska says, experimental work, including research on depression, was performed only on males, so that researchers wouldn’t have to control for women’s monthly hormone fluctuations. But thanks in part to pioneering studies like hers, scientists are beginning to recognize the importance of studying the sexes separately. 

The differences in stress response between males and females are at least partly due to the sex hormones, says Sajdel-Sulkowska. Testosterone increases cortisol levels, so the stress response is greater in males; the effects of stressors on the thyroid hormone, too, are different. But beyond that, she points out that each sex has different issues when it comes to health in general: different microbiota, different disease risks, and different disease progressions and mortality rates. As a result, treatments for many diseases may need to be tailored specifically for males or females to be effective. (See “Depression is different for women. One-size-fits-all drugs aren’t helping.”) And even once both environmental factors and sex differences are considered, individual differences, such as a person’s unique microbiome, are likely to matter too. Sajdel-Sulkowska foresees a day when artificial intelligence will make it possible to correlate the differences in individuals’ microbiomes with disease, ultimately leading to individualized probiotic treatments for a variety of conditions—perhaps including depression. 

Sajdel-Sulkowska would remain in Poland for a full decade, returning to the US in September of 2020. A year later, after 35 years as an assistant professor, she was forced to retire from HMS when Harvard didn’t renew her faculty appointment. Having focused on research without giving much thought to advancement, she was suddenly without an academic home. In 2022, she joined the National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS) so she could continue her work without being affiliated with a particular university.

Sajdel-Sulkowska never had the security of a tenured position and estimates that over the course of her career, her average salary was $35,000 a year. (“I never realized that I could name my compensation,” she says.) But she was never in it for the money; she was driven by the work itself. And in her home country, she received some of the recognition that eluded her at Harvard. During her decade of research and teaching in Poland, she was awarded the country’s highest academic honor when she was named a Presidential Professor by Polish president Andrzej Duda.

CIARA CROCKER

Upon returning to the US during the pandemic, Sajdel-Sulkowska tackled a literature review to look for connections between covid, the microbiome, and the gut-brain axis, the physical and biochemical signals that go back and forth between the digestive system and the central nervous system (see sidebar). But the theme of stress continued to intrigue her; she published a paper on maternal stress in rats in 2021 and has another in progress. This recent research closes the circle opened with her doctoral thesis at MIT, she says: “I did my PhD thesis on stress—and I’m ending my career with [studying] stress.”

Sajdel-Sulkowska sees how her current work might apply to her own life. Her mother endured extreme stress during World War II, and she experienced extreme stress herself as a child born just before the Warsaw Uprising. Now, she wonders how that might affect her own children—in humans, the epigenet­ic effect of stress is known to stretch for multiple generations.