Feature interview: A new definition of success
science life and society 3:00 pm today
It's been said the best minds a generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. Brilliant minds are going underused while big problems go unsolved says historian Rutger Bregman. He argues it's possible to build a life that's both ambitious and idealistic. He calls for a new definition of success, measured by impact, not income in his new book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting your Talent and Start Making a Difference.
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RNZ News
30-05-2025
- RNZ News
Abortion pill inventor Etienne-Emile Baulieu dies, aged 98
By Benedicte Rey and Isabelle Tourne, AFP The inventor of the abortion pill Etienne-Emile Baulieu died at home in Paris on Friday. Photo: Joel Saget French scientist Etienne-Emile Baulieu, the inventor of the abortion pill, has died at the age of 98 at his home in Paris, according to his wife. The doctor and researcher, who achieved worldwide renown for his work that led to the pill, had an eventful life that included fighting in the French Resistance and becoming friends with artists such as Andy Warhol. "His research was guided by his commitment to the progress made possible by science, his dedication to women's freedom, and his desire to enable everyone to live better, longer lives," Baulieu's wife Simone Harari Baulieu said in a statement on Friday. French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Baulieu's life, calling him "a beacon of courage" and "a progressive mind who enabled women to win their freedom". "Few French people have changed the world to such an extent," he added in a post on X. Baulieu's most famous discovery helped create the oral drug RU-486, also known as mifepristone, which provided a safe and inexpensive alternative to surgical abortion to millions of women across the world. For decades, he pushed governments to authorise the drug, facing fierce criticism and sometimes threats from opponents of abortion. When Wyoming became the first US state to outlaw the abortion pill in 2023, Baulieu told AFP it was "scandalous". Then aged 96, Baulieu said he had dedicated a large part of his life to "increasing the freedom of women", and such bans were a step in the wrong direction. On news of his death, French Equality Minister Aurore Berge passed on her condolences to Baulieu's family, saying on X he was "guided throughout his life by one requirement: human dignity". Born on 12 December, 1926 in Strasbourg to Jewish parents, Etienne Blum was raised by his feminist mother after his father, a doctor, died. He changed his name to Emile Baulieu when he joined the French Resistance against Nazi occupation at the age of 15, then later adding Etienne. After the war, he became a self-described "doctor who does science," specialising in the field of steroid hormones. Invited to work in the United States, Baulieu was noticed in 1961 by Gregory Pincus, known as the father of the contraceptive pill, who convinced him to focus on sex hormones. Back in France, Baulieu designed a way to block the effect of the hormone progesterone, which is essential for the egg to implant in the uterus after fertilisation. This led to the development of mifepristone in 1982. Dragged before the courts and demonised by US anti-abortion groups who accused him of inventing a "death pill", Baulieu refused to back down. "Adversity slides off him like water off a duck's back," Simone Harari Baulieu told AFP. "You, a Jew and a Resistance fighter, you were overwhelmed with the most atrocious insults and even compared to Nazi scientists," Macron said as he presented Baulieu with France's top honour in 2023. "But you held on, for the love of freedom and science." In the 1960s, literature fan Baulieu became friends with artists such as Andy Warhol. He said he was "fascinated by artists who claim to have access to the human soul, something that will forever remain beyond the reach of scientists". Baulieu kept going into his Parisian office well into his mid-90s. "I would be bored if I did not work anymore," he said in 2023. His recent research has included trying to find a way to prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease, as well as a treatment for severe depression, for which clinical trials are currently underway across the world. "There is no reason we cannot find treatments" for both illnesses, he said. Baulieu was also the first to describe how the hormone DHEA secreted from adrenal glands in 1963. He was convinced of the hormone's anti-ageing abilities, but drugs using it only had limited effects, such as in skin-firming creams. In the United States, Baulieu was also awarded the prestigious Lasker prize in 1989. After his wife Yolande Compagnon died, Baulieu married Simone Harari in 2016. He leaves behind three children, eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, according to the statement released by his family. - AFP
RNZ News
29-05-2025
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How we make things - and how we could do it better
All our needs and wants - almost every aspect of our lives in fact - support a global manufacturing system that operates 24/7 to make - and to bring us - pretty much everything we could possibly wish for. But have you ever wondered how all of that actually happens? And if we are serious about a sustainable future, what choices we really should be making now. Tim Minshall is the University of Cambridge's first Professor of Innovation and author of Your Life Is Manufactured . He explains to Susie Ferguson why understanding how things are made and the consequences of your decision to buy them could become your new superpower! Tim Minshall is Professor of Innovation at the University of Cambridge Photo: SUPPLIED/Allen & Unwin
RNZ News
25-05-2025
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Thomas Moynihan: Is increasing complexity humanity's path to survival or destruction?
Can humanity take a path toward a better future? Cambridge University's Dr Thomas Moynihan thinks we have the tools that make it possible. Photo: CHRISTIAN BARTHOLD Humanity's strength is in our shared knowledge and thinking - a kind of 'global brain', Cambridge University's Dr Thomas Moynihan says. But does increasing complexity ultimately create a path to our species' certain destruction, or can we build a more benevolent future? Dr Thomas Moynihan is a writer interested in the history of our thoughts about the future. He is a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the author of X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. And in a recent article for Noema magazine, discussed the idea we're unintentionally building an artificial 'world brain'. It is thought that 99 percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. But Moynihan says compared to the length of time humans have existed, it has only been the past few hundred years we've begun to seriously contemplate our own possible extinction. "When we do think about the sheer complexity of the planetary predicament and the amount of vested interest in corruption globally, the crumbling of geopolitical stabilities, I think we've reached a point of such technological might but haven't got the systems in place to harness that in productive ways. So, not to be too despondent, but it is a quite terrifying situation," he says. "There are these branching paths ahead of us, and some of these lead - in the near term, within potentially decades, maybe even years - to wholesale destruction. The world seems more precarious than ever." Moynihan is not willing to speculate on how likely extinction is for humanity, but he says others have: Lord Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal has given us a 50:50 chance of making it to the end of the century, while Oxford University philosopher Toby Ord has predicted there is a one in six chance we won't make it that long. "But then there are other futures," Moynihan says. "There are other paths out of the present wherein that doesn't happen and we continue doing the things that we've been doing." What does AI mean for the future of the planet? Can it help us save ourselves? "AI seems new and it seems scary and newfangled, because we often think that we haven't been doing that with cognitive processes - and to a degree that is true, but at the same time intelligence has never been brain-bound," Moynihan says. "We learn who we are and what we're capable of and all the things that make us powerful as intelligent agents from the outside in - we learn from copying our parents and our community. "Humans have always been completely enmeshed with their technologies and have been transformed by them, and therefore created more transformative technologies in turn. And so this is, in a sense, an extension of that long-run process that's been going on forever." Photo: 123rf The future is going to be much stranger, he says. "If things go well and these more cataclysmic scenarios don't happen, but we do develop more powerful more potent AI systems - the kind of positive vision that I see is not utopias of abundance and all human problems are solved. Again, history is going to get more complicated as that happens, and therefore that final kind of destination, that utopia is never going to quite happen, in my eyes. "We'll begin cooperating with these systems and they'll transform us and our interests will transform in turn, and it'll be this open ended ongoing process. "To really zoom out, the project of human enquiry, is all based upon us trying to know more about the world so we can navigate it better, so that we can mitigate the risks better. This began with the invention of crop circulation or the dam, or even city walls." Ironically, as we gain knowledge and our society and technology become more complex, different new risks are created, he says. "That project of inquiry that began with the invention of crop circulation also led to the invention of hydrogen bombs." Of the thinkers who have considered the invention of a global human brain, there are as many who have said it is beneficial and what we need to survive as have said it is catastrophic and terrible, he says. Each step on the pathway - from the leap from single-celled organisms to multicellular creatures, from solitary hunters to large-scale cooperative groups - each step comes with the sacrifice of separate autonomy to a collective that is a more potent and complex whole. "So, this is just to assume that all this world brain stuff is feasible anyway - which it may not be; But if you think about it, that we are creating a far more complex planetary system and are far more coordinated globally, even if that hasn't led to peace ... if that's going to intensify, then of course something like a loss of autonomy will necessarily have to happen on the human individual." Humanity was destined to make predictions about our future, but the scope of our ability to foresee what could be ahead took time to develop, he says. "You go back to anywhere in the ancient world and no-one had quite yet noticed that the entire human future could be be drastically different to the past, and in unpredictable ways, in some sense simply because there just wasn't enough historic record yet. "So there wasn't the chronicle to look back and go 'oh the past was a foreign country', such that the future might become one too. "But also because the rate of change was so slow that within one lifetime you didn't really see so many things changing - that kind of rate of unprecedented change is only going to continue." Today's forms of art, cultural expression and media would have been almost incomprehensible to the ancients, Moynihan says. Photo: AFP "Now we step into the future with almost more of the opposite, I think. We now appreciate just how complicated everything is, and just how the smallest tiny inflection or perturbation can change the entire future in completely cascading ways. "It took Edward Lorenz in the 1960s to discover this by accident by messing around with weather simulations on his computer, to arrive at this fundamental insight from chaos theory - is that even in deterministic systems, very small changes to initial systems can leave to completely divergent futures. "And ... that metaphor of the branching paths - we now know that that applies profoundly at planetary level. If that can cultivate again that kind of sense of collective responsibility, then that would be a brilliant thing." Moynihan himself is hopeful the future can be more in line with proposals that have been made of a hopeful vision and cooperative steps forward. "And I do think that in the current era - you look at the people in charge and the ways that they act, and of course that seems like a completely idealistic thing. But then again, only 200 years ago the idea that universal suffrage was real, and that women would have the vote and that civil rights would be a thing that happened, and LGBT rights - those things would have all seemed impossible. "So I think we have to keep thinking that what seems impossible to us now can change overnight." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
