TheChek News Flow

PARIS, Dec 14 (Reuters) - France's revamped rules on consumer cash incentives for electric car purchases favour vehicles made in France and Europe over models manufactured in China, a government list of eligible car types published on Thursday showed.

Some 65% of electric cars sold in France will be eligible for the scheme, which from Friday will include new criteria covering the amount of carbon emitted in the manufacturing of an electric vehicle (EV).

The list of eligible models includes 24 produced by Franco-Italian group Stellantis (STLAM.MI) and five by French carmaker Renault (RENA.PA). Elon Musk's Tesla (TSLA.O) Model Y will be eligible but not its Model 3.

Electric vehicle brand MG Motors, owned by China's SAIC, said it expects the new rules to weigh on the French EV market.

"There are cars that will entirely lose their competitiveness", an MG spokesperson told Reuters, adding that the brand had decided not to apply for the bonus scheme for its MG4 model because it was "designed to exclude us".

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire hailed what he called the new rules' incentive for automakers to reduce their carbon footprint.

"We will no longer be subsidising car production that emits too much CO2," he said in a statement.

President Emmanuel Macron's government has wanted to make French and European-made EVs more affordable for domestic consumers relative to cheaper vehicles produced in China.

The average retail price of an EV in Europe was more than 65,000 euros ($71,000) in the first half of 2023, compared with just over 31,000 euros in China, according to research by Jato Dynamics.

The French government already offered buyers a cash incentive of between 5,000 and 7,000 euros to get more electric cars on the road, at a total cost of 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) per year.

However, in the absence of cheap European-made EVs, a third of all incentives are going to consumers buying EVs made in China, French finance ministry officials say. The trend has helped spur a surge in imports and a growing competitive gap with domestic producers.

China's auto industry relies heavily on coal-generated electricity, meaning many Chinese-made EVs will henceforth not qualify.

The Ademe agency overseeing the process studied the eligibility of almost 500 EV models and their variants to include in the scheme.

Dacia, the low-cost Renault brand, saw its Spring model imported from China excluded from the list.

Tesla's Model 3 is made in China. The Model Y, which is larger and more expensive, is made mainly in Berlin and was the top selling EV in France over the first 11 months of the year.

Charles McGonigal had pleaded guilty to violating US sanctions by helping the Russian oligarch spy on a rival

A former high-ranking FBI agent who agreed to work as a covert investigator for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska has been sentenced in New York to more than four years in prison, after pleading guilty in August to violating US sanctions and money laundering laws.

Charles McGonigal, who previously served as special agent in charge of counter-intelligence at the FBI’s New York office and who had investigated Deripaska during his time in the agency, was arrested in January. He was charged with helping the oligarch investigate his business rival and fellow oligarch Vladimir Potanin.

McGonigal “abused his position” as one of the most important counter-intelligence officers in the world, assistant US attorney Hagan Scotten told the court prior to sentencing on Thursday. Scotten said the former agent tried to “turn his credentials into cash” and was hoping to make millions of dollars in retirement from his connections.

The government had previously said that while at the FBI McGonigal was “taking advantage of his position to build a Rolodex of rogues to whom he could offer his services after retiring”.

Fighting back tears, McGonigal appealed to the court for leniency, saying he had a “deep sense of remorse and sorrow” for betraying the confidence of those closest to him and damaging the reputation of the FBI.

McGonigal’s lawyers emphasised that their client had served his country with distinction and even helped thwart an attack on the New York City subway in his years at the FBI. They had asked the judge to refrain from sentencing him to any prison time, while the government had asked the judge to impose the maximum 60 months.

Judge Jennifer Rearden ultimately handed down a 50-month sentence, as well as a $40,000 fine and three years of supervised release. She said McGonigal “knew that his actions violated . . . sanctions” and that he had “posed a great risk to national security”.

Deripaska, who made his fortune in metals, was first sanctioned by the US in 2018, in response to Russia’s earlier annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.

He is one of the few oligarchs to have spoken out against Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which he has called “madness” and a “colossal mistake” even while avoiding direct criticism of the Russian president. But his clashes with the Kremlin over the war have done little to mend his longstanding and hostile relationship with western authorities. 

Prosecutors had alleged that McGonigal, who retired from the FBI in 2018 after 22 years at the agency, agreed in 2021 to “investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for concealed payments from Deripaska”. He worked for the oligarch via a law firm and directly, they said, and earned more than $17,000 for his services.

US authorities charged Deripaska and his associates in September 2022 with violating sanctions, while Ekaterina Voronina, Deripaska’s girlfriend, was charged with making false statements to US authorities as she attempted to enter the country to give birth to the couple’s child. 

In April, Deripaska defeated an attempt by a former business associate to have him fined or jailed for contempt of court in London’s High Court.

Federal judge in San Francisco likely to order billionaire’s cooperation with agency’s probe into his 2022 takeover of Twitter

SAN FRANCISCO—A federal judge said she would probably order Elon Musk to cooperate with a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation related to his 2022 takeover of Twitter.

During a hearing Thursday in San Francisco, Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler said the SEC has broad investigatory powers.

The SEC’s probe looks at whether Musk committed civil fraud by omitting information about his plans for Twitter when he bought up the company’s shares between January and April 2022, according to recent court filings. Musk has long clashed with the SEC, which separately accused him of fraud in 2018, and the billionaire sought the San Francisco court’s protection from what he considers regulatory harassment.

He is contesting the SEC’s ability to continue asking him for information about Twitter, which he has since renamed X. Judge Beeler listened to his lawyers’ arguments but said she planned to order the two sides to figure out a location and date for Musk’s testimony. If they can’t agree, she added, she would decide for them.

The SEC has twice interviewed Musk in connection with the Twitter probe. The first session was cut short because Musk’s lawyers disputed the investigators’ authority to ask questions about the Twitter deal, according to court filings. Musk’s legal team consented to another interview after the commission formally broadened the scope of its investigation.

Musk is still taking an aggressive legal stance to try to hold back the SEC. On Thursday, his lawyers made constitutional arguments against the agency’s ability to issue subpoenas.

The probe centers on how Musk in April 2022 disclosed his buying spree in Twitter shares. Investors who purchase more than 5% of a company’s stock have to promptly report their stake. The disclosure warns the market that a significant investor could seek control or influence over the company.

Musk initially reported being a passive shareholder who didn’t plan to take over Twitter or influence it. The next day, he submitted another form that showed deeper involvement with the company, including an offer he received to join its board of directors.

A week later, Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion. The deal closed in October 2022. Musk renamed the company as X in July 2023, saying it was part of a plan to turn the website into an “everything app” that would provide audio, video, messaging and payment features.

Musk and the SEC have dueled on and off since 2018, when the agency charged him with defrauding investors by tweeting about his plan to take Tesla private. Musk settled the civil case by paying a $20 million fine, giving up his role as Tesla’s chairman, and agreeing to have some of his tweets about Tesla precleared by company lawyers.

He was scheduled to provide testimony for a third time in connection with the Twitter probe on Sept. 15 but didn’t show up, regulators said. The agency later offered to meet at a location closer to Musk’s Texas home, but the agency’s efforts “were met with Musk’s blanket refusal to appear for testimony,” the SEC wrote.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May 2022 that securities regulators were investigating Musk’s late disclosure of his stake.

His latest court battle with securities regulators opens a rare window into how SEC investigations work. The SEC has sought copies of every communication Musk had with Twitter from January to April 2022 and “full forensic images” of all devices Musk used to communicate with the company or about his share purchases. Musk says he has handed over hundreds of documents.

Musk says the SEC has issued “dozens upon dozens of subpoenas” to him or companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, according to a recent court filing. The probe into his purchases of Twitter stock involved 32 subpoenas and three requests for Musk to testify, his lawyers wrote in filings to the court.

Most people and entities facing SEC investigations comply with the agency’s demands for information. But the SEC’s subpoenas aren’t self-enforcing. When the occasional investigative target refuses to comply, the SEC needs a judge to compel their cooperation.

Several federal investigations are under way into Musk’s actions apart from his Twitter takeover. Manhattan federal prosecutors and the SEC are looking into whether Tesla company funds were used on a secret project that had been described internally as a house for Musk, who is chief executive of the electric-vehicle manufacturer, The Wall Street Journal reported in August, citing people familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department and SEC have also each opened an investigation into whether Tesla misled customers and investors about the performance of its advanced driver-assistance system known as Autopilot. Tesla this week said it would recall more than two million vehicles over government contentions that drivers can misuse Autopilot.

While investors were preparing to go nuclear after Sam Altman’s unceremonious ouster from OpenAI and Altman was plotting his return to the company, the members of OpenAI’s Superalignment team were assiduously plugging along on the problem of how to control AI that’s smarter than humans.

Or at least, that’s the impression they’d like to give.

This week, I took a call with three of the Superalignment team’s members — Collin Burns, Pavel Izmailov and Leopold Aschenbrenner — who were in New Orleans at NeurIPS, the annual machine learning conference, to present OpenAI’s newest work on ensuring that AI systems behave as intended.

OpenAI formed the Superalignment team in July to develop ways to steer, regulate and govern “superintelligent” AI systems — that is, theoretical systems with intelligence far exceeding that of humans.

“Today, we can basically align models that are dumber than us, or maybe around human-level at most,” Burns said. “Aligning a model that’s actually smarter than us is much, much less obvious — how we can even do it?”

The Superalignment effort is being led by OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, which didn’t raise eyebrows in July — but certainly does now in light of the fact that Sutskever was among those who initially pushed for Altman’s firing. While some reporting suggests Sutskever is in a “state of limbo” following Altman’s return, OpenAI’s PR tells me that Sutskever is indeed — as of today, at least — still heading the Superalignment team.

Superalignment is a bit of touchy subject within the AI research community. Some argue that the subfield is premature; others imply that it’s a red herring.

While Altman has invited comparisons between OpenAI and the Manhattan Project, going so far as to assemble a team to probe AI models to protect against “catastrophic risks” including chemical and nuclear threats, some experts say that there’s little evidence to suggest the startup’s technology will gain world-ending, human-outsmarting capabilities anytime soon — or ever. Claims of imminent superintelligence, these experts add, serve only to deliberately draw attention away from and distract from the pressing AI regulatory issues of the day, like algorithmic bias and AI’s tendency toward toxicity.

For what it’s worth, Suksever appears to believe earnestly that AI — not OpenAI’s per se, but some embodiment of it — could someday pose an existential threat. He reportedly went so far as to commission and burn a wooden effigy at a company offsite to demonstrate his commitment to preventing AI harm from befalling humanity, and commands a meaningful amount of OpenAI’s compute — 20% of its existing computer chips — for the Superalignment’s team’s research.

“AI progress recently has been extraordinarily rapid, and I can assure you that it’s not slowing down,” Aschenbrenner said. “I think we’re going to reach human-level systems pretty soon, but it won’t stop there — we’re going to go right through to superhuman systems … So how do we align superhuman AI systems and make them safe? It’s really a problem for all of humanity — perhaps the most important unsolved technical problem of our time.”

The Superalignment team, currently, is attempting to build governance and control frameworks that might apply well to future powerful AI systems. It’s not a straightforward task considering that the definition of “superintelligence” — and whether a particular AI system has achieved it — is the subject of robust debate. But the approach the team’s settled on for now involves using a weaker, less-sophisticated AI model (e.g. GPT-2) to guide a more advanced, sophisticated model (GPT-4) in desirable directions — and away from undesirable ones.

“A lot of what we’re trying to do is tell a model what to do and ensure it will do it,” Burns said. “How do we get a model to follow instructions and get a model to only help with things that are true and not make stuff up? How do we get a model to tell us if the code it generated is safe or egregious behavior? These are the types of tasks we want to be able to achieve with our research.”

But wait, you might say — what does AI guiding AI have to do with preventing humanity-threatening AI? Well, it’s an analogy: the weak model is meant to be a stand-in for human supervisors while the strong model represents superintelligent AI. Similar to humans who might not be able to make sense of a superintelligent AI system, the weak model can’t “understand” all the complexities and nuances of the strong model — making the setup useful for proving out superalignment hypotheses, the Superalignment team says.

“You can think of sixth-grade student trying to supervise a college student,” Izmailov explained. “Let’s say the sixth grader is trying to tell the college student about a task that he kind of knows how to solve … Even though the supervision from the sixth grader can have mistakes in the details, there’s hope that the college student would understand the gist and would be able to do the task better than the supervisor.”

In the Superalignment team’s setup, a weak model fine-tuned on a particular task generates labels that are used to “communicate” the broad strokes of that task to the strong model. Given these labels, the strong model can generalize more or less correctly according to the weak model’s intent — even if the weak model’s labels contain errors and biases, the team found.

The weak-strong model approach might even lead to breakthroughs in the area of hallucinations, claims the team.

“Hallucinations are actually quite interesting, because internally, the model actually knows whether the thing it’s saying is fact or fiction,” Aschenbrenner said. “But the way these models are trained today, human supervisors reward them ‘thumbs up,’ ‘thumbs down’ for saying things. So sometimes, inadvertently, humans reward the model for saying things that are either false or that the model doesn’t actually know about and so on. If we’re successful in our research, we should develop techniques where we can basically summon the model’s knowledge and we could apply that summoning on whether something is fact or fiction and use this to reduce hallucinations.”

But the analogy isn’t perfect. So OpenAI wants to crowdsource ideas.

To that end, OpenAI is launching a $10 million grant program to support technical research on superintelligent alignment, tranches of which will be reserved for academic labs, nonprofits, individual researchers and graduate students. OpenAI also plans to also host an academic conference on superalignment in early 2025, where it’ll share and promote the superalignment prize finalists’ work.

Curiously, a portion of funding for the grant will come from former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt. Schmidt — an ardent supporter of Altman — is fast becoming a poster child for AI doomerism, asserting the arrival of dangerous AI systems is nigh and that regulators aren’t doing enough in preparation. It’s not out of a sense of altruism, necessarily — reporting in Protocol and Wired note that Schmidt, an active AI investor, stands to benefit enormously commercially if the U.S. government were to implement his proposed blueprint to bolster AI research.

The donation might be perceived as virtue signaling through a cynical lens, then. Schmidt’s personal fortune stands around an estimated $24 billion, and he’s poured hundreds of millions into other, decidedly less ethics-focused AI ventures and funds — including his own.

Schmidt denies this is the case, of course.

“AI and other emerging technologies are reshaping our economy and society,” he said in an emailed statement. “Ensuring they are aligned with human values is critical, and I am proud to support OpenAI’s new [grants] to develop and control AI responsibly for public benefit.”

Indeed, the involvement of a figure with such transparent commercial motivations begs the question: will OpenAI’s superalignment research as well as the research it’s encouraging the community to submit to its future conference be made available for anyone to use as they see fit?

The Superalignment team assured me that, yes, both OpenAI’s research — including code — and the work of others who receive grants and prizes from OpenAI on superalignment-related work will be shared publicly. We’ll hold the company to it.

“Contributing not just to the safety of our models but the safety of other labs’ models and advanced AI in general is a part of our mission,” Aschenbrenner said. “It’s really core to our mission of building [AI] for the benefit of all of humanity, safely. And we think that doing this research is absolutely essential for making it beneficial and making it safe.”

Apple now sells the AirPods Pro USB-C case by itself — for $99

You no longer need to buy an entirely new set of AirPods Pro just to get a case with a USB-C port.

Apple has begun selling the USB-C charging case for its second-generation AirPods Pro as a standalone purchase. But it doesn’t come cheap. The MagSafe-compatible case, available immediately, is priced at $99. Still, if you’re dead set on switching all of your gadgets to USB-C and already own a pair of second-gen AirPods Pro with a Lightning case, this upgrade is cheaper than buying a whole new set.

Delivery estimates are already showing an arrival date of after Christmas, so the case might not be a viable holiday stocking stuffer unless your local Apple store gets stock in the coming days.

The USB-C AirPods Pro, which released earlier this year, still have some advantages over the original Lightning model. Namely, they’re dust-resistant, in addition to being able to handle splashes of water. (The standalone case is rated IP54 just like the earbuds.) The USB-C AirPods Pro will also be able to deliver lossless audio wirelessly when used with Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset upon its release next year.

But as long as you’ve got the second-gen buds with either port, you can take advantage of Apple’s latest AirPods Pro software features like Adaptive Audio and Conversation Detection.

EDF told not to expect UK to step in to fund flagship nuclear project

Cost overruns a ‘commercial issue’ for Hinkley Point C’s French developer after CGN halts payments, says British official

The UK government has signalled it will not step in to help France’s EDF fund Hinkley Point C after its Chinese partner CGN halted payments to cover mounting cost overruns on Britain’s flagship nuclear power project. 

The reluctance of the British government to intervene comes as the price tag for the power plant under construction in south-west England is likely to exceed the revised £32.7bn estimate EDF put on it earlier this year, according to people close to discussions.

CGN, EDF’s partner in Hinkley Point C, had agreed to finance 33.5 per cent of the original £18bn cost of the plant in 2016, with the French group responsible for the remainder.

But after paying its contracted share, CGN has not made payments linked to the overruns in recent weeks, three people familiar with the matter said. The French group warned earlier this year that the Chinese group could refuse to pick up the extra costs.

“There was an expectation this would happen and now it has,” one of the people said. “EDF is looking at ways the British government might be able to help but these discussions could take time.”

One UK government official said there were no plans to step in to fill the gap left by CGN, suggesting EDF could pull in other investors. “It is a commercial contract which we obviously don’t play a part in financing,” the official said, adding: “It would first be a matter for the shareholders.”

One industry source said pulling other investors into the project at this stage would be “complicated”.

The French economy ministry said it was in contact with London over the issue. “We’re working with the British government to ensure the rollout of the UK nuclear programme, including on the financing front,” an official in Paris said.

French President Emmanuel Macron last year ordered EDF to be fully nationalised after its finances were hit hard during the energy crisis just as it was gearing up for a huge investment programme to build a fleet of new nuclear power plants in France.

EDF plays a similar key role in Britain where, in a joint venture with Centrica, it owns and operates the current fleet of ageing nuclear power plants, most of which are due to cease operation by the end of the decade.

It is also the only company developing new large reactors in the UK, including a second project on the Suffolk coast called Sizewell C, to offset the significant loss of nuclear-generating capacity in the coming years.

Plans to build a new fleet of reactors for the UK have been around for almost two decades but the programme has been dogged by delays and the withdrawal of several private companies as successive Conservative governments have struggled to find a financing model that worked.

The £32.7bn bill for Hinkley Point C in Somerset is being recalculated. Two people familiar with the matter said the costs were likely to rise again and its long-delayed opening, currently scheduled for June 2027, was likely to be delayed once more.

The fallout over funding for Hinkley Point C comes as relations between London and Beijing have deteriorated in recent years. Early last decade, the Tory-led government turned to China to help fund the building of its new generation of nuclear reactors.

But more recent Conservative governments have taken a more aggressive stance towards Beijing after the suppression of democratic protests in Hong Kong, its more hostile stance towards Taiwan and allegations of spying.

In recent years, ministers moved to limit Beijing’s influence in UK infrastructure projects, including by pushing CGN out of the civil nuclear programme and its involvement in Sizewell C.

EDF declined to comment. CGN could not be reached for comment.

The board should include a data ethicist, a philosopher of mind, a neuroscientist, a computer scientist with interdisciplinary expertise and a political strategist.

Sam Altman’s sudden ouster and revolving-door return as CEO of OpenAI was the result of a boardroom power struggle between Altman and board members like Helen Toner who raised concerns about the unbridled power of artificial intelligence. The debacle shows that when a board is not aligned with the objectives of management and investors, chaos ensues.

What comes next for OpenAI will require extreme statesmanship from Altman and surgical implementation of just the right checks to balance the safety risks of AI against the company’s commercial interests. The stakes will only rise as the company continues to pursue its quest for artificial general intelligence, the kind of AI that can learn and think like humans.

Navigating the perilous road ahead requires a clear resolution to what started this conflict: the unusual makeup of OpenAI’s board, which controls a nonprofit organization that oversees OpenAI’s for-profit businesses.

I’ve argued that addressing AI’s biggest questions requires an interdisciplinary approach. AI is not just an engineering challenge but a human challenge requiring comprehensive consideration of technological, policy, moral and epistemological issues. OpenAI needs a revamped board of directors guided by fiduciaries who are fully equipped to handle all of them.

The former OpenAI board was brash and unsophisticated. It didn’t have a transition plan sorted out before firing Altman, nor did it appear to have contemplated the effects of its seismic decision. Professional fiduciaries examine all the facts, alternatives and risks, and then proceed stepwise. They look at a slate of potential successors, weigh the pros and cons, consider the broader ramifications and move in a thoughtful, calculated manner. I’ve seen community boards composed of well-meaning novices exercise 1,000 times more acumen than OpenAI’s board—which is why all but one member is gone.

Altman now has a unique opportunity to use his negotiating power to shape a governance structure that balances the ethical and safety concerns of OpenAI’s technology with its commercial interest. He does not have sole discretion, but he certainly has more power and fewer constraints than he did pre-coup. If he uses this power wisely, it will seal his reputation as a “master of AI and persuasion,” as Paul Graham, a co-founder of Y Combinator, has described him, while attending to the concerns and objectives of his investors.

I’m betting on Altman to effectively straddle these lines and manage the resulting complexities.

The temporary board currently consists of Bret Taylor, former co-CEO of Salesforce and Twitter’s final board chair prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition; Larry Summers, an economist and former president of Harvard University who served as treasury secretary during the Clinton administration; and Adam D’Angelo, Quora CEO and a holdover from OpenAI’s previous board who apparently played a significant role in Altman’s return. The final OpenAI board will have nine seats in total.

Taylor and Summers are heavy-hitting, pragmatic veterans who can provide the commercial, financial and regulatory guidance Altman needs. But Toner and her supporters were right about one thing: We can’t swat away the long-term concerns about AI. Appointing a new board that doesn’t attend to AI’s societal risks would be a grave mistake.

Achieving ethical AI requires an integrative approach rooted in critical thinking from both the humanities and the sciences. Those disciplines also need to be represented on the board, which should include a data ethicist, a philosopher of mind, a neuroscientist, a computer scientist with interdisciplinary expertise and a political strategist.

There are promising candidates for data ethicist; I like Kate Crawford or R. David Edelman for this role. Crawford has expertise in understanding large-scale data systems, machine learning and AI in broader cultural contexts. Edelman would bring both political acumen, as the architect of the U.S.’s first international cyber policy and AI policy, and the technical background to ask critical questions about the data that fuel OpenAI’s systems. The person holding this seat would address short- and long-term issues with data and AI, including but not limited to articulating and adopting ethical data principles, citizens’ rights around how OpenAI uses their data and protocols for shaping and adequately controlling AI behavior.

Daniel Dennett could fill the spot for a philosopher of mind. He’s the “great American rationalist,” a leading light who has thought deeply for decades about the intersection of computing, epistemology, language and consciousness. This perspective is critical to consider the longer-term, existential concerns of AI with a principal focus on the alignment problem: how to define safeguards, policies, back doors and kill switches for AI to align it to the maximum extent possible with human needs and objectives. Dennett would be a welcome contrast to the fundamentalism of prior board members Toner and Tasha McCauley and would address OpenAI’s unintended consequences.

Promising candidates for the neuroscientist seat include polymath David Sulzer, a leading expert on how different parts of the brain communicate, and Karl Friston, developer of the free energy principle (an organizing principle of life and intelligence). A neuroscientist would advise on critical questions of sentience and how intelligence unfolds within AI models, what models of human cognition are most relevant and useful for the development of AI, and what AI can teach us about human cognition.

Noted computer scientist Fei-Fei Li would bring a computational and cognitive neuroscience lens to navigate the fast-evolving possibilities of the interface between human cognition and AGI—while also examining the technical advances OpenAI needs to advance its commercial interests.

There are reports that OpenAI considered but did not select philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Of these, Rice would have rounded out the board with diverse policy expertise, though Summers can provide political savvy to manage the regulatory issues with AI. If Altman isn’t considering former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the seat of a political strategist, he should.

Altman has a small window of opportunity to put forward suggestions to strengthen the board. At the end of the day, whether this board can create the checks and balances OpenAI needs is the biggest question of Altman’s leadership—and the biggest legacy he’ll leave in the most consequential job he’ll ever have.

Research into ‘colonisation resistance’ boosts efforts to harness microbes to improve general health

Teams of bacteria in the gut help fight disease by eating the food that invading pathogens need to thrive, according to research that underscores the health benefits of fostering humans’ rich digestive ecology.

Intestinal bugs’ wide-ranging appetites have the secondary impact of starving incoming microbes that cause infections such as salmonella and pneumonia, says the paper published in Science on Thursday.

The findings boost the growing research effort to improve human resistance to bacteria that are introduced via eating and drinking but can cause illness elsewhere in the body. They offer the prospect of making intestinal tracts more hostile to dangerous new entrants through dietary changes and bespoke supplements of beneficial bugs.

This field is becoming increasingly important as the rise in antibiotic resistance triggers a quest for alternative methods of treating and preventing bacterial diseases.

“The eureka moment was when we put groups of gut bacteria together and they acted against the pathogens,” said Kevin Foster, a professor at Oxford university and a co-author of a paper in the publication Science. “The human host, by allowing non-harmful bugs to grow, can prevent the growth of harmful ones.”

The research focused on two pathogens: Salmonella enterica Serovar Typhimurium and Klebsiella pneumoniae, which occurs in the gut naturally but can cause diseases ranging from meningitis to urinary tract infections.

The scientists then tested 100 gut microbes to gauge their effectiveness at stopping the two invading bacteria — a phenomenon known as “colonisation resistance”.

The defending microbes offered little or no obstacle to the pathogen pair when deployed alone but were much more effective when introduced in certain combinations, the research found.  

The resident gut bacteria compete with each other for food and in doing so achieve what Foster dubbed the “knock-on effect” of depriving the pathogens of nourishment.

The research adds to a growing interest in the gut microbiome as a tool to combat disease and promote good health throughout the body.

Companies such as Microbiotica, a Cambridge-based 2016 spinout from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, are working to develop therapeutics based on bugs in the digestive system.

Deeper understanding of gut microbe activity potentially opens the way to devising sophisticated “probiotic” mixes of beneficial bugs, according to a commentary published separately in Science on Thursday and written by authors unconnected to the latest research paper.

“[This] could allow clinicians to administer tailored probiotic communities that prevent difficult or impossible-to-treat infections from occurring in the first place,” write the commentary’s co-authors, Lauren Radlinski and Prof Andreas Bäumler of the University of California Davis.