The Body Scientific

By Richard Kessin

My wife does not like clutter. When she sees 50 issues of Nature, the British science magazine piled on my desk, she gets a little peremptory. “Out!” she said. I decided on the dignity of an orderly retreat.

I had been looking for subjects to write about in what I hope will be a post-Covid world. Call it an act of faith, or at least optimism. So I sorted through each issue, slicing out interesting articles and pitching the rest. In the frenzy of Covid results and explanations over the past 20 months, did I miss anything that would interest people of northwest Connecticut?

Plenty, it turned out. There has been a lot of success with gene therapy, specifically the treatment of the immune deficiency that gives rise to babies that have defective immune systems, and sickle cell anemia. There are advances in cancer immunotherapy and interesting articles on antibiotic resistance of bacteria. Our understanding of Parkinson’s disease is advancing. There was a lot, and I hope to wrote about these topics over the coming year—if Covid continues to recede, which is not a given. 

The article that really caught my attention was comparatively frivolous. That is what I was looking for, a little writerly R & R. It was about curling—42-pound-stones-with-handles-on-ice curling. Curling is an obsession not a frivolity in Norfolk. The Norfolk Curling Club, of which I am a drinking but not a playing member, starts laying down ice at the end of September. It is a fine art because the ice must have a certain consistency and surface.

Even if you’ve never been to the curling club, you may have seen curling in the Olympics. It may be the only Olympic sport in which players can tolerate a bit of a beer belly. Curling is elegant in its own way and has its own lore. The stones, for example, are beautifully milled granite from a quarry in Scotland. Curling is slippery and the stones are heavy, but happily, there are adaptations for the aged. Curling is slow and classical, even sedate, and its rules are not to be trifled with. That is why the article in Nature was so strange. 

A team in South Korea has designed a robot that curls. It sends a rotating stone down the ice with great accuracy. It needs a few throws to get used to the ice, but after that, it’s game on. In addition to the condition of the ice, the robot calculates how to deal with other stones that are in the way. There are no sweepers to direct a moving stone, but there seems to be no need. I confess it is a rather sleek and attractive robot.

How does robot do compared to elite human competition? The robot’s stones were closer to the target (called the house) in two-thirds of the matches. It is early days though. Count me a bit of a skeptic. The team from the University of Seoul has given us a U-tube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj3ur1uW-7Q.

I look forward to competitions between artificial intelligence-powered curling robots. Or perhaps even mixed matches with humans. I will not even attempt to explain artificial intelligence, although a friend, a computer expert from Slovenia, once explained it to me. Perhaps we will get him to Norfolk during curling season. 

The robot’s name is Curly, of course.