More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 18 - April 2, 2021
Darwin and Wallace had a key trait that is a catalyst for creativity: they had wide-ranging interests and were able to make connections between different disciplines.
The key aspect of his intellect, she realized, was his ability to make unexpected connections between different fields.
If some RNA molecules could store genetic information and also act as a catalyst to spur chemical reactions, they might be more fundamental to the origins of life than DNA, which cannot naturally replicate themselves without the presence of proteins to serve as a catalyst.3
the name CRISPR, for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.”
“No great technology has flourished until people had complete access to it.”
the misfits and rebels and troublemakers who are not fond of rules and have no respect for the status quo. “They push the human race forward,” Jobs said. “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
The evolutionary process cares little about what happens to us after we have children and get them to a safe age, so there are a whole bunch of middle-aged maladies, including Huntington’s and most forms of cancer, that we humans would want to eliminate, even though nature sees no need to.
As we learn to treat mood disorders with drugs and eventually with genetic editing, will we have more happiness but fewer Hemingways? Do we wish to live in a world in which there are no Van Goghs?
Twitter, unsurprisingly, is not the best forum to discuss bioethics. There is a truism about internet comment boards: any discussion descends to shouting “Nazi!” within seven responses. In the case of the gene-editing threads, it was more like by the third response.
Two science fiction books can also help shape our discussion: George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Permitting parents to buy the best genes for their kids would represent a true quantum leap in inequality.
the realization that biology has become the new tech.
The long-range solution to our fight against viruses is the same as the one bacteria found: using CRISPR to guide a scissors-like enzyme to chop up the genetic material of a virus, without having to enlist the patient’s immune system. Once
