It's all part of balancing bureaucracy with research goals for Williams, a leading expert on racial trauma and psychedelic medicine, as well as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), at the University of Ottawa. She's exploring the use of hallucinogenic substances like MDMA and psilocybin — commonly known as ecstasy and magic mushrooms, respectively — to help people of color address the psychological impacts of systemic racism. A prolific researcher, Williams also works as an expert witness, offering clinical evaluations for racial trauma cases.
Scientists have long known that psychedelics produce an altered state of consciousness and openness to new perspectives. For people with mental health conditions who haven't benefited from traditional therapy, psychedelics may be able to help them discover what's causing their pain or trauma, including racial trauma—the mental and emotional injury spurred by racial bias.
"Using psychedelics can not only bring these pain points to the surface for healing, but can reduce the anxiety or response to these memories and allow them to speak openly about them without the pain they bring," Williams says. Her research harnesses the potential of psychedelics to increase neuroplasticity, which includes the brain's ability to build new pathways.
"People of color are dealing with racism all the time, in large and small ways, and even dealing with racism in healthcare, even dealing with racism in therapy."
But she says therapists of color aren't automatically equipped to treat racial trauma. First, she notes, people of color are "vastly underrepresented in the mental health workforce." This is doubly true in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, in which a person is guided through a psychedelic session by a therapist or team of therapists, then processes the experience in subsequent therapy sessions.
"On top of that, the therapists of color are getting the same training that the white therapists are getting, so it's not even really guaranteed that they're going to be any better at helping a person that may have racial trauma emerging as part of their experience," she says.
In her own training to become a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia, Williams says she was taught "how to be a great psychologist for white people." Yet even people of color, she argues, need specialized training to work with marginalized groups, particularly when it comes to MDMA, psilocybin and other psychedelics. Because these drugs can lower natural psychological defense mechanisms, Williams says, it's important for providers to be specially trained.
"People of color are dealing with racism all the time, in large and small ways, and even dealing with racism in healthcare, even dealing with racism in therapy. So [they] generally develop a lot of defenses and coping strategies to ward off racism so that they can function." she says. This is particularly true with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: "One possibility is that you're going to be stripped of your defenses, you're going to be vulnerable. And so you have to work with a therapist who is going to understand that and not enact more racism in their work with you."
Williams has struggled to find funding and institutional approval for research involving psychedelics, or funding for investigations into racial trauma or the impacts of conditions like OCD and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in people of color. With the bulk of her work focusing on OCD, she hoped to focus on people of color, but found there was little funding for that type of research. In 2020, that started to change as structural racism garnered more media attention.
After the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, by a white police officer in May 2020, Williams was flooded with media requests. "Usually, when something like that happens, I get contacted a lot for a couple of weeks, and it dies off. But after George Floyd, it just never did."
Monnica Williams, clinical psychologist at the University of Ottawa
Williams was no stranger to the questions that soon blazed across headlines: How can we mitigate microaggressions? How do race and ethnicity impact mental health? What terms should we use to discuss racial issues? What constitutes an ally, and why aren't there more of them? Why aren't there more people of color in academia, and so many other fields?
Now, she's hoping that the increased attention on racial justice will mean more acceptance for the kind of research she's doing.
In fact, Williams herself has used psychedelics in order to gain a better understanding of how to use them to treat racial trauma. In a study published in January, she and two other Black female psychotherapists took MDMA in a supervised setting, guided by a team of mental health practitioners who helped them process issues that came up as the session progressed. Williams, who was also the study's lead author, found that participants' experiences centered around processing and finding release from racial identities, and, in one case, of simply feeling wholly human without the burden of racial identity for the first time.
The purpose of the study was twofold: to understand how Black women react to psychedelics and to provide safe, firsthand, psychedelic experiences to Black mental health practitioners. One of the other study participants has since gone on to offer psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to her own patients.
Psychedelic research, and psilocybin in particular, has become a hot topic of late, particularly after Oregon became the first state to legalize it for therapeutic use last November. A survey-based, observational study with 313 participants, published in 2020, paved the way for Williams' more recent MDMA experiments by describing improvements in depression, anxiety and racial trauma among people of color who had used LSD, psilocybin or MDMA in a non-research setting.
Williams and her team included only respondents who reported a moderate to strong psychoactive effect of past psychedelic consumption and believed these experiences provided "relief from the challenging effects of ethnic discrimination." Participants reported a memorable psychedelic experience as well as its acute and lasting effects, completing assessments of psychological insight, mystical experience and emotional challenges experienced during psychedelic experience, then describing their mental health — including depression, anxiety and trauma symptoms — before and after that experience.
Still, Williams says addressing racism is much more complex than treating racial trauma. "One of the questions I get asked a lot is, 'How can Black people cope with racism?' And I don't really like that question," she says. "I think it's important and I don't mind answering it, but I think the more important question is, how can we end racism? What can Black people do to stop racism that's happening to them and what can we do as a society to stop racism? And people aren't really asking this question."
Artificial Intelligence is already helping to grow some of the food we eat.
The chef-farmers choose from among 45 types of herb and leafy-greens seeds, plop them into grow trays, and a few weeks later they pick and serve. While success is predicated on at least a small amount of these humans’ care, the systems are autonomously surveilled round-the-clock from Babylon’s base of operations. And artificial intelligence is helping to run the show.
Babylon piloted the use of specialized cameras that take pictures in different spectrums to gather some less-obvious visual data about plants’ wellbeing and alert people if something seems off.
Imagine consistently perfect greens and tomatoes and strawberries, grown hyper-locally, using less water, without chemicals or environmental contaminants. This is the hefty promise of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) — basically, indoor farms that can be hydroponic, aeroponic (plant roots are suspended and fed through misting), or aquaponic (where fish play a role in fertilizing vegetables). But whether they grow 4,160 leafy-green servings per year, like one Babylon farm, or millions of servings, like some of the large, centralized facilities starting to supply supermarkets across the U.S., they seek to minimize failure as much as possible.
Babylon’s soilless hydroponic growing system
Courtesy Babylon Micro-Farms
Here, AI is starting to play a pivotal role. CEA growers use it to help “make sense of what’s happening” to the plants in their care, says Scott Lowman, vice president of applied research at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research (IALR) in Virginia, a state that’s investing heavily in CEA companies. And although these companies say they’re not aiming for a future with zero human employees, AI is certainly poised to take a lot of human farming intervention out of the equation — for better and worse.
Most of these companies are compiling their own data sets to identify anything that might block the success of their systems. Babylon had already integrated sensor data into its farms to measure heat and humidity, the nutrient content of water, and the amount of light plants receive. Last year, they got a National Science Foundation grant that allowed them to pilot the use of specialized cameras that take pictures in different spectrums to gather some less-obvious visual data about plants’ wellbeing and alert people if something seems off. “Will this plant be healthy tomorrow? Are there things…that the human eye can't see that the plant starts expressing?” says Amandeep Ratte, the company’s head of data science. “If our system can say, Hey, this plant is unhealthy, we can reach out to [users] preemptively about what they’re doing wrong, or is there a disease at the farm?” Ratte says. The earlier the better, to avoid crop failures.
Natural light accounts for 70 percent of Greenswell Growers’ energy use on a sunny day.
Courtesy Greenswell Growers
IALR’s Lowman says that other CEA companies are developing their AI systems to account for the different crops they grow — lettuces come in all shapes and sizes, after all, and each has different growing needs than, for example, tomatoes. The ways they run their operations differs also. Babylon is unusual in its decentralized structure. But centralized growing systems with one main location have variabilities, too. AeroFarms, which recently declared bankruptcy but will continue to run its 140,000-square foot vertical operation in Danville, Virginia, is entirely enclosed and reliant on the intense violet glow of grow lights to produce microgreens.
Different companies have different data needs. What data is essential to AeroFarms isn’t quite the same as for Greenswell Growers located in Goochland County, Virginia. Raising four kinds of lettuce in a 77,000-square-foot automated hydroponic greenhouse, the vagaries of naturally available light, which accounts for 70 percent of Greenswell’s energy use on a sunny day, affect operations. Their tech needs to account for “outside weather impacts,” says president Carl Gupton. “What adjustments do we have to make inside of the greenhouse to offset what's going on outside environmentally, to give that plant optimal conditions? When it's 85 percent humidity outside, the system needs to do X, Y and Z to get the conditions that we want inside.”
AI will help identify diseases, as well as when a plant is thirsty or overly hydrated, when it needs more or less calcium, phosphorous, nitrogen.
Nevertheless, every CEA system has the same core needs — consistent yield of high quality crops to keep up year-round supply to customers. Additionally, “Everybody’s got the same set of problems,” Gupton says. Pests may come into a facility with seeds. A disease called pythium, one of the most common in CEA, can damage plant roots. “Then you have root disease pressures that can also come internally — a change in [growing] substrate can change the way the plant performs,” Gupton says.
AI will help identify diseases, as well as when a plant is thirsty or overly hydrated, when it needs more or less calcium, phosphorous, nitrogen. So, while companies amass their own hyper-specific data sets, Lowman foresees a time within the next decade “when there will be some type of [open-source] database that has the most common types of plant stress identified” that growers will be able to tap into. Such databases will “create a community and move the science forward,” says Lowman.
In fact, IALR is working on assembling images for just such a database now. On so-called “smart tables” inside an Institute lab, a team is growing greens and subjects them to various stressors. Then, they’re administering treatments while taking images of every plant every 15 minutes, says Lowman. Some experiments generate 80,000 images; the challenge lies in analyzing and annotating the vast trove of them, marking each one to reflect outcome—for example increasing the phosphate delivery and the plant’s response to it. Eventually, they’ll be fed into AI systems to help them learn.
For all the enthusiasm surrounding this technology, it’s not without downsides. Training just one AI system can emit over 250,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, according to MIT Technology Review. AI could also be used “to enhance environmental benefit for CEA and optimize [its] energy consumption,” says Rozita Dara, a computer science professor at the University of Guelph in Canada, specializing in AI and data governance, “but we first need to collect data to measure [it].”
The chef-farmers can choose from 45 types of herb and leafy-greens seeds.
Courtesy Babylon Micro-Farms
Any system connected to the Internet of Things is also vulnerable to hacking; if CEA grows to the point where “there are many of these similar farms, and you're depending on feeding a population based on those, it would be quite scary,” Dara says. And there are privacy concerns, too, in systems where imaging is happening constantly. It’s partly for this reason, says Babylon’s Ratte, that the company’s in-farm cameras all “face down into the trays, so the only thing [visible] is pictures of plants.”
Tweaks to improve AI for CEA are happening all the time. Greenswell made its first harvest in 2022 and now has annual data points they can use to start making more intelligent choices about how to feed, water, and supply light to plants, says Gupton. Ratte says he’s confident Babylon’s system can already “get our customers reliable harvests. But in terms of how far we have to go, it's a different problem,” he says. For example, if AI could detect whether the farm is mostly empty—meaning the farm’s user hasn’t planted a new crop of greens—it can alert Babylon to check “what's going on with engagement with this user?” Ratte says. “Do they need more training? Did the main person responsible for the farm quit?”
Lowman says more automation is coming, offering greater ability for systems to identify problems and mitigate them on the spot. “We still have to develop datasets that are specific, so you can have a very clear control plan, [because] artificial intelligence is only as smart as what we tell it, and in plant science, there's so much variation,” he says. He believes AI’s next level will be “looking at those first early days of plant growth: when the seed germinates, how fast it germinates, what it looks like when it germinates.” Imaging all that and pairing it with AI, “can be a really powerful tool, for sure.”
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have laid the foundations for growing synthetic embryos that could develop a beating heart, gut and brain.
The organoid revolution
In 1981, scientists discovered how to keep stem cells alive. This was a significant breakthrough, as stem cells have notoriously rigorous demands. Nevertheless, stem cells remained a relatively niche research area, mainly because scientists didn’t know how to convince the cells to turn into other cells.
Then, in 1987, scientists embedded isolated stem cells in a gelatinous protein mixture called Matrigel, which simulated the three-dimensional environment of animal tissue. The cells thrived, but they also did something remarkable: they created breast tissue capable of producing milk proteins. This was the first organoid — a clump of cells that behave and function like a real organ. The organoid revolution had begun, and it all started with a boob in Jello.
For the next 20 years, it was rare to find a scientist who identified as an “organoid researcher,” but there were many “stem cell researchers” who wanted to figure out how to turn stem cells into other cells. Eventually, they discovered the signals (called growth factors) that stem cells require to differentiate into other types of cells.
For a human embryo (and its organs) to develop successfully, there needs to be a “dialogue” between these three types of stem cells.
By the end of the 2000s, researchers began combining stem cells, Matrigel, and the newly characterized growth factors to create dozens of organoids, from liver organoids capable of producing the bile salts necessary for digesting fat to brain organoids with components that resemble eyes, the spinal cord, and arguably, the beginnings of sentience.
Synthetic embryos
Organoids possess an intrinsic flaw: they are organ-like. They share some characteristics with real organs, making them powerful tools for research. However, no one has found a way to create an organoid with all the characteristics and functions of a real organ. But Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz, a developmental biologist, might have set the foundation for that discovery.
Żernicka-Goetz hypothesized that organoids fail to develop into fully functional organs because organs develop as a collective. Organoid research often uses embryonic stem cells, which are the cells from which the developing organism is created. However, there are two other types of stem cells in an early embryo: stem cells that become the placenta and those that become the yolk sac (where the embryo grows and gets its nutrients in early development). For a human embryo (and its organs) to develop successfully, there needs to be a “dialogue” between these three types of stem cells. In other words, Żernicka-Goetz suspected the best way to grow a functional organoid was to produce a synthetic embryoid.
As described in the aforementioned Nature paper, Żernicka-Goetz and her team mimicked the embryonic environment by mixing these three types of stem cells from mice. Amazingly, the stem cells self-organized into structures and progressed through the successive developmental stages until they had beating hearts and the foundations of the brain.
“Our mouse embryo model not only develops a brain, but also a beating heart [and] all the components that go on to make up the body,” said Żernicka-Goetz. “It’s just unbelievable that we’ve got this far. This has been the dream of our community for years and major focus of our work for a decade and finally we’ve done it.”
If the methods developed by Żernicka-Goetz’s team are successful with human stem cells, scientists someday could use them to guide the development of synthetic organs for patients awaiting transplants. It also opens the door to studying how embryos develop during pregnancy.
This article originally appeared on Big Think, home of the brightest minds and biggest ideas of all time.
