W6 - Scottish independence: Queen was asked to intervene amid yes vote fears

Scottish independence: Queen was asked to intervene amid yes vote fears

Amid No 10 meltdown, cabinet secretary and monarch’s private secretary crafted words that voters should ‘think very carefully’

The Guardian, Tuesday 16 December 2014 21.23 GMT

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Senior figures in Whitehall and Downing Street became so fearful that the Scottish independence referendum could lead to the breakup of the United Kingdom that the Queen was asked to make a rare public intervention in the final days of the campaign.

Britain’s most senior civil servant and the Queen’s private secretary crafted a carefully worded intervention by the monarch, as No 10 experienced what one senior official described as “meltdown” in the closing stages of the campaign after polls showed growing support for a yes vote.

The discussions between Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Christopher Geidt for the palace, led the Queen to issue an appeal to the people of Scotland four days before the referendum in September to “think very carefully” before casting their vote.

The delicate negotiations in the runup to the intervention by the Queen, which were described by one senior Whitehall source as a warning to voters that they were facing “a decision filled with foreboding”, are revealed by the Guardian on the final day of a two-part series about the Scottish referendum campaign.

The Queen, who has been scrupulous during her 62-year reign in observing the impartiality expected of a constitutional monarch, intervened publicly on 14 September. Speaking after Sunday service outside Crathie Kirk near her Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire, the Queen told a wellwisher: “Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future.”

She spoke out after senior Whitehall figures, who were apprised of David Cameron’s concerns that the yes camp was developing an ominous momentum in the final period of the campaign, suggested to the palace that an intervention by the Queen would be helpful.

The suggestion was made during the last few weeks of the referendum after a YouGov/Times poll on Tuesday 2 September reported a six-point fall in support for the pro-UK side in a month. Key figures in Downing Street and Whitehall, led by the prime minister and the cabinet secretary, assessed all the options they could deploy to halt what appeared to be the yes side’s momentum.

Cameron discussed the referendum with the Queen a week before her public intervention when he travelled to Balmoral for his annual visit. On that trip, there was a particular focus on the referendum when the campaign was electrified by the publication of another poll, a Sunday Times/YouGov survey on 7 September, the final day of the prime minister’s Balmoral visit, which gave the yes side its first lead – by 51% to 49%.

The Whitehall source added that the referendum was discussed during Cameron’s Balmoral stay. “I don’t think it was frosty. I think there might have been the odd humorous comment over the porridge about supposing he had some work to do next week.”

The prime minister is said to have talked about the Queen’s humour on the occasion to friends. There was also a suggestion that the atmosphere had, at times, been frosty. You could imagine the chilly atmosphere at the breakfast table, the prime minister is said to have remarked to friends afterwards.

Discussions about interventions by the monarch are by convention a matter for the cabinet secretary and palace officials. This explains why the contacts in the runup to the Queen’s public comments took place between Heywood and Geidt, described by the Whitehall source as the two key figures at the heart of Britain’s “deep state”.

The two men are understood to have initially discussed the wisdom of a public intervention by the monarch, who is scrupulously impartial. Once it became clear that the Queen was minded to speak out, Geidt and Heywood then needed to fashion language which, while broadly neutral, would leave nobody in any doubt about her support for the union.

There was a determination to ensure she did not cross a line, as some said she did when she spoke of the benefits of the UK in her silver jubilee address to a joint session of parliament in 1977. In remarks which were seen as an attempt by the Labour government of Jim Callaghan to warn of the dangers posed by the Scottish National party after it had won 11 seats in the October 1974 general election, she said: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.”

The Whitehall source said the Queen’s intervention was carefully calibrated. “She knew exactly what she was doing, which is, there are two possible responses on the referendum. [They are] either: one, you buy into this is a fantastic festival of democracy, or two, you suggest this is a decision filled with foreboding. So by saying I hope people will think carefully you imply the second. So if they’d said: ‘What do you think of the referendum ma’am?’ and she’d said: ‘Oh it’s lovely’, that would be very different. Without her taking a side, it cast just the right element of doubt over the nature of the decision.”

The final day of the Guardian’s Scotland referendum series also highlights Gordon Brown’s pivotal role in helping to save the UK in the final period of campaigning. Cameron and George Osborne were so nervous about a yes vote, which would have thrown his premiership into a potentially fatal crisis, that camp beds were laid on for senior officials in Downing Street on the night of the referendum count.

The dominance of the referendum explains why a relieved Cameron told the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an overheard conversation days after the referendum, that the Queen had “purred down the line” when he told her the result.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the discussions between Geidt and Heywood. A Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: “We do not comment on discussions between the Queen’s private secretary and civil servants.” A Downing Street spokesman said: “No comment.”

A palace spokesman said of the prime minister’s discussions with the Queen at Balmoral: “As is the convention, we do not comment on conversations between the prime minister and the Queen.” A Downing Street spokesman said: “We do not discuss the prime minister’s conversations with Her Majesty the Queen.”

• This article was amended on 17 December 2014. An earlier version said Samantha Cameron had accompanied the prime minister to Balmoral in September. That is not the case.

Vocab.

apprised - 通報

ominous - 不吉利的

momentum - 氣勢

referendum  - 公投

deploy - 部署

halt - 停止

when - Tuesday 16 December 2014 21.23 GMT

where - UK

why - Scotland was to vote for their independence.

What - Right before the referendum, Queen was asked to have an intervention to show her opinion over the vote.

how - Queen was asked to an intervention, and she told the Scottish to think about it very carefully.

who - Mainly the Queen.

W6-Why Haven’t We Found a Cure for Ebola in Boston?

In West Africa alone, the World Health Organization reports that the current Ebola outbreak— the most severe on record—has killed more than 6,000 out of the 17,000 people who have contracted it. Here in Boston, you could literally bump into someone working on a cure, but it’s a process often hampered by lack of funding and facilities.

Across the river, the Wyss Institute at Harvard University has developed a device that may be able to remove Ebola (and other pathogens) from the bloodstream. Researchers at the Sabeti Lab at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have attempted to unlock the way the virus works by sequencing and analyzing more than 99 Ebola virus genomes. They also catalogued 395 mutations.

Before this year’s outbreak, many Americans had never heard of Ebola. But the virus isn’t new. It first emerged in 1976, and over the decades, the Ebolavirus genus has mutated into five strains, four of which make humans sick. Though unprecedented in its size and spread in populated areas, the world has seen the 2014 strain, called “Zaire,” before. Researchers say the Zaire strain is more than 90 percent identical to the virus that caused the first known outbreak. It’s slightly more similar to an outbreak that happened in 1995, and it’s even more similar to a 2007 outbreak.Down Huntington Avenue, Northeastern University bio and chemical engineers are using nanotechnology to kill Ebola and stop it from mutating.

It’s been almost 40 years since we first saw Zaire ebolavirus. So why aren’t we further along on a cure? Research on viruses like Ebola in Boston often gets to a certain point, then must take a pause until the timing, funding, and available facilities align to test researchers’ theories. This can add years of delay to an already complicated process.

Facilities

At this point, the only places that can work with the Zaire ebolavirus and its mutations are biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories with the safety protocols and isolation components required to work with dangerous and rare viruses. But there are approximately 10 labs like this in the United States, at different stages of clearance and construction, which can create a bottleneck for research.

Boston actually has one of those labs. The National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory (NEIDL) was built by Boston University on its South End medical school campus in 2008. BSL-2 and BSL-3 research is performed there, but between the political, legal, and regulatory hurdles (not to mention the outcry from the surrounding community), the BSL-4 lab has yet to open (and the BSL-3 only opened in January of this year).

As the Ebola outbreak raged last fall, NEIDL was in the midst of inspections by the Boston Public Health Commission and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to hopefully, finally, clear the last hurdles so researchers can get to work.

At Boston University School of Medicine’s microbiology lab, virologist John Connor is one of the researchers waiting for the lab to open. Connor’s team has been collaborating with other BSL-4 labs in the country for the past five years on building a portable diagnostic test tool ideal for remote areas with limited electricity. Connor has National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for his diagnostic work, so it’s progressing and continuing to be tested. But he says he wishes it could have all taken place closer to home.

“Having a facility that can operate safely and effectively in close proximity to lots of intelligent people should speed up a lot of the development process, because it’s a lot easier to have conversations and get things started when it’s 15 minutes on the T and on the No. 10 bus, versus going down to the CDC or the NIH,” Connor said. “There’s a ceiling on the amount of work that can be done because of the amount of facilities.”

For the past four years, Connor has also been developing treatments for rare viruses including Ebola, but they might not see light by the time this outbreak is contained.

“What we’re really trying to do is find new ways that people haven’t tried before to find molecules that look and find the Achilles heel in viruses like Ebola,” said Connor. Before the Zaire ebolavirus reemerged in 2014, Connor’s team in March published research identifying a small molecule that inhibits Ebola (and other viruses) from replication. These molecules could lead to the development of an antiviral treatment that stops the virus from growing in a sick person.

“The life cycle of the virus is that it comes into a cell, and then it’s supposed to make copies of itself, and then brings in genetic material and makes copies of that genetic material to make a new virus cell and RNA delivery,” Connor said. “The molecule we developed appears to block that engine.”

Down the hall from Connor, Elke Mühlberger is researching enzymes to train the molecules Connor discovered to block the Ebola virus’s replication. But her work at the NEIDL lab and collaboration with Connor’s team can only go so far without BSL-4 facilities.

The team has managed to prove their Ebola antiviral works in a culture at other BSL-4 labs, but now Connor is waiting to test whether the molecule inhibits the virus in a small animal. Then, they can escalate to a non-human primate, and finally, submit their research for approval with the FDA to test a small group of patients. That’s a five-year timeline—without any delays.

Funding

Unfortunately, Connor’s team lacks the funding from the NIH to take the antiviral research forward, even if the NEIDL resources were fully available. It’s a common story these days.

Connor’s antiviral project has been on hold for over a year and a half. Although the Food and Drug Administration has sped along the development of a few Ebola vaccines, his project is too far behind in the process to be escalated. Even if it wasn’t, Connor says vaccines that protect people and contain Ebola’s spread tend to get preference over therapeutic treatments.

“The likelihood of developing post therapeutic treatments is much less [than a vaccine],” Connor said. “If you use a post exposure therapeutic, you can protect the people that were affected. If you use a vaccine, you can not only protect the people who have been infected but also the people who have not yet been infected and ideally limit the prospects of it happening again.”

The NIH has been working on a vaccine for the Zaire ebolavirus since 2001. After 13 years of work, it has reached animal trials. But when the outbreak began to spread rapidly this summer, the vaccine had not reached a phase 1 clinical trial to be tested on humans. Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, blamed the cut in research funding for slowing down all research, but especially the development of vaccines for infectious diseases.

“I have to tell you, if we had not gone through this 10-year decline in the support of biomedical research, we would be a year or two ahead of where we are now,” Collins said at House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health in September. “And think about the difference that would make, had we in 2014 been in the position to distribute rapidly tens of thousands of doses, in collaboration with our colleagues at GSK, of this vaccine, how much different would this be and how many lives would have been saved.”

Connor said progress is very difficult when it’s so hard to find research dollars. “We’ve worked for a number of years developing antiviral candidates to target these nasty viruses, and the work we’re doing there is important,” said Connor. “And the NIH agrees with us, but the money just isn’t there.”

And neither is a cure.

Correction: A previous version of this article identified The Broad Institute as part of Harvard. The Broad Institute is an independent organization affiliated with Harvard and MIT. The picture of the researcher is at the Broad Institute, not the Sabeti lab as previously captioned.

From: http://www.boston.com/health/2014/12/08/why-haven-found-cure-for-ebola-boston/MSlcjIbkLmuNCycszqhJGJ/story.html

Vocab. 

literally -從字面上

sequencing - 排序

genomes - 基因組

catalogued - 編目

mutations - 突變

strain - 應變

unprecedented - 史無前例

align - 調整

protocol - 協議

hurdles - 障礙

when-12.08.14 | 6:23 PM

where- Boston, US

why- not enough facilities

what- reserchers have worked on finding cure for Ebolavirus, but delayed due to lack of facility.

how- One team actually have found a cure for Ebola, but now the process of developing the cure is stopped beacuse of the lack of facilities.