EU27 regional trade networks for medical products in fight against Covid-19 pandemic: Quantifying vulnerability and self sufficiency in critical inputs.

The Covid-19 pandemic spread fast due to a lack of vaccines and a severe shortage of medical products to treat and combat the disease. Many studies have focused on the characteristics of extant global supply chains and trade networks that are determined by globalization drives for production to low-cost countries and the technological complexity of products with many components distributed globally. This, along with the lockdown of many sectors and national policies that divert exports for domestic use, are reasons for lack of access, especially, in Western countries to these products. Governments adopted policies that aim to mitigate vulnerability to imports of critical medical products that include self-sufficiency measures such as increased domestic production, stockpiling and reduction of exports. However, there is as yet no quantitative way to assess if a country's vulnerability to critical imports has been reduced by such drives for self-sufficiency, when other countries in the trade network follow similar policies. For this we develop a Google PageRank style centrality measure based on the Markose-Giansante eigen-pair method for a specially constructed global bilateral trade network to assess the vulnerability of net importers of critical medical products when they attempt to mitigate it by regional or domestic buffers. We use the network vulnerability centrality measure to quantify the regional self-sufficiency for EU27 countries over 2019-2021 for four Covid-19 critical medical products, viz. facemasks, personal protective equipment, ventilators and hand sanitizers. Despite, growth in value and share of intra-EU regional trade in most of these products by 2021, some countries did not achieve the reduction of vulnerability centrality.

Complexification of eukaryote phenotype: Adaptive immuno-cognitive systems as unique Gödelian blockchain distributed ledger.

The digitization of inheritable information in the genome has been called the 'algorithmic take-over of biology'. The McClintock discovery that viral software based transposable elements that conduct cut-paste (transposon) and copy-paste (retrotransposon) operations are needed for genomic evolvability underscores the truism that only software can change software and also that viral hacking by internal and external bio-malware is the Achilles heel of genomic digital systems. There was a paradigm shift in genomic information processing with the Adaptive Immune System (AIS) 500 mya followed by the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), latterly mostly in primate brains, which reaches its apogee in human social cognition. The AIS and MNS involve distinctive Gödelian features of self-reference (Self-Ref) and offline virtual self-representation (Self-Rep) for complex self-other interaction with prodigious open-ended capacity for anticipative malware detection and novelty production within a unique blockchain distributed ledger (BCDL). The role of self-referential information processing, often considered to be central to the sentient self with origins in the immune system 'Thymic self', is shown to be part of the Gödel logic behind a generator-selector framework at a molecular level, which exerts stringent selection criteria to maintain genomic BCDL. The latter manifests digital and decentralized record keeping where no internal or external bio-malware can compromise the immutability of the life's building blocks and no novel blocks can be added that is not consistent with extant blocks. This is demonstrated with regard to somatic hypermutation with novel anti-body production in the face of external non-self antigen attacks.

Genomic Intelligence as Über Bio-Cybersecurity: The Gödel Sentence in Immuno-Cognitive Systems.

This paper gives formal foundations and evidence from gene science in the post Barbara McClintock era that the Gödel Sentence, far from being an esoteric construction in mathematical logic, is ubiquitous in genomic intelligence that evolved with multi-cellular life. Conditions uniquely found in the Adaptive Immune System (AIS) and Mirror Neuron System (MNS), termed the genomic immuno-cognitive system, coincide with three building blocks in computation theory of Gödel, Turing and Post (G-T-P). (i) Biotic elements have unique digital identifiers with gene codes executing 3D self-assembly for morphology and regulation of the organism using the recursive operation of Self-Ref (Self-Reference) with the other being a self-referential projection of self. (ii) A parallel offline simulation meta/mirror environment in 1-1 relation to online machine executions of self-codes gives G-T-P Self-Rep (Self-Representation). (iii) This permits a digital biotic entity to self-report that it is under attack by a biotic malware or non-self antigen in the format of the Gödel sentence, resulting in the "smarts" for contextual novelty production. The proposed unitary G-T-P recursive machinery in AIS and in MNS for social cognition yields a new explanation that the Interferon Gamma factor, known for friend-foe identification in AIS, is also integral to social behaviors. New G-T-P bio-informatics of AIS and novel anti-body production is given with interesting testable implications for COVID-19 pathology.