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July 25 - August 17, 2022
Curiosity-driven research into the wonders of nature plants the seeds, sometimes in unpredictable ways, for later innovations.
Night science just as valuable as day science
at age twenty-two, he was offered the chance to ride as the gentleman collector on a round-the-world voyage of the privately funded brig-sloop HMS Beagle.
Wish that was a job title I could hold
“An Essay on the Principle of Population” by Thomas Malthus, an English economist. Malthus argued that the human population was likely to grow faster than the food supply. The resulting overpopulation would lead to famine that would weed out the weaker and poorer people.
Science advances are propelled by publicity.
“They were complementary strands, interlocked by irreverence, zaniness, and fiery brilliance,” the writer-physician Siddhartha Mukherjee noted.
Mukherjee!
Momentarily I wondered how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair. Then, however, my main concern was her description of the crystalline X-ray diffraction pattern.”
Pauling was stopped at the airport in New York and had his passport confiscated because he had been spouting enough pacifist opinions that the FBI thought he might be a threat to the country if allowed to travel.
Watson later admitted in a feeble attempt at graciousness, “Her past uncompromising statements on this matter thus reflected first-rate science, not the outpourings of a misguided feminist.”
some bacteria found in soil are able to communicate so that they can join together when they are starved for nutrients. They form a commune called a “fruiting body.” Millions of the bacteria figure out how to aggregate by sending out chemical signals.
The key aspect of his intellect, she realized, was his ability to make unexpected connections between different fields.
The only way I could understand our son and help him live at a normal level was to decipher the genome.”4
Seems grounded in eugenics/abilism
the enduring power of being in the same location as other smart people.
By trying to explain it to him, she was able to clarify her own ideas about what the data meant.
She had fun on the beach, but I had more fun analyzing sequences from E. coli bacteria.”6 Spoken like a dedicated scientist.
Starter cultures for yogurt and cheese are made from bacteria, and the greatest threats to the $40 billion global market are viruses that can destroy bacteria. So Danisco was willing to spend a lot of money for research into how bacteria defend themselves against these viruses.
A study in 2019 of more than six million articles with women as the principal author showed that they are less likely to use self-promotional terms, such as “novel” and “unique” and “unprecedented,” to describe their findings.
women are 21 percent less likely to use positive and self-promotional words in describing their work. Partly as a result, their papers are cited approximately 10 percent less frequently.12
Also like the arts, once a scientist masters the basic routine, she has to combine it with creativity. “You have to be rigorous and disciplined,” Charpentier explains, “but also know when to let yourself loose and blend in a creative approach. I found in biological research the right combination of persistence and creativity.”
She hated the phrase “work-life balance” because it implied that work competes with life. Her work in the lab and her “passion for science,” she says, brought her a “happiness that is as fulfilling as any other passion.”
“She pushed me to make things, even on a computer, rather than play with things that other people had made.”
the field of optogenetics, which uses light to stimulate neurons in the brain. That allowed them to map different circuits in the brain and gain insights about how they functioned or malfunctioned.
Whiteboarding is like a sport, the way foosball is in less rarefied offices.
the fact that five different papers on CRISPR-Cas9 editing in animal cells all appeared in January 2013 reinforced the argument that this discovery was inevitable after it had been shown that it could work in a test tube.
“His write-up serves as yet another instance of a woman being written out of scientific history,” Ruth Reader, a science journalist, wrote in Mic. “This helps explain the urgency behind the backlash to Lander’s report: Here again, a male leader appears to be usurping credit (and therefore financial gain) for a discovery that was the work of many.”
1873, for example, the French biologist Louis Pasteur was awarded the first known patent for a microorganism: a method for making “yeast free from organic germs of disease.” Thus we have pasteurized milk, juice, and wine.
Ellison would be great on the Supreme Court, which nowadays could use at least one justice who understands biology and technology.24
For example, the fight against cystic fibrosis, which affects primarily white Americans and Europeans, has received eight times more funding from government, charities, and foundations.
the military the largest single source of money for CRISPR research.2
“The Case Against Perfection: What’s Wrong with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic Engineering,” which he published in The Atlantic in 2004.27 The other key thinker was Francis Fukuyama, who in 2000 published Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, which was a forceful call for governments to regulate biotechnology.
the National Academy of Sciences realized that. Even as they called for public discussion of the issue, they created a twenty-two-person committee of experts to undertake a yearlong study on whether there should be a moratorium on germline DNA edits. In their final report, issued in February 2017, the group did not call for a ban or a moratorium. Instead, it provided a list of criteria that should be met before germline editing should be allowed, among them: “absence of reasonable alternatives, restriction to preventing a serious disease or condition,” and a few others that were not
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“One may imagine that scientists could create a person with desired features. This may be a mathematical genius, an outstanding musician, but this can also be a soldier, a person who can fight without fear or compassion, mercy or pain.”21
2021 memoir, How to Be Human, he reflects on whether gene editing should be used, if it becomes feasible, to eliminate some of the causes of autism. “You’d be removing an aspect of the human experience,” he writes, “but for what benefit exactly?”
Such questions prompt us to look at “disabilities” and ask to what extent they are inherently disabling and to what extent the disadvantage is due to our social constructs and prejudices.
does the good life have aims that are deeper? Should the goal be that each person can flourish, in a more profound fashion, by using talents and traits in a way that is truly fulfilling? If so, that would require authentic experiences, real accomplishments, and true efforts, rather than engineered ones. Does the good life entail making a contribution to our community, society, and civilization? Has
A liberal or libertarian genetics of individual choice could eventually lead us—just as surely as government-controlled eugenics—to a society with less diversity and deviation from the norm. That might be pleasing to a parent, but we would end up in a society with a lot less creativity, inspiration, and edge. Diversity is good not only for society but for our species. Like any species, our evolution and resilience are strengthened by a bit of randomness in the gene pool.
All medical advances attempt to correct something that happened “naturally,” she realized. “Sometimes nature does things that are downright cruel, and there are many mutations that cause enormous suffering, so the idea that germline editing was unnatural began to carry less weight for me,”
What distinguishes biological research is the collaboration that is woven in. The camaraderie of being rival warriors in a common quest
“Some
I wonder how this conversation would shift under a true universal healthcare system
Joseph Graves, the first African American to get a PhD in evolutionary biology, gave a studied rebuttal to those views. “We know a great deal about human genetic variation and how it is apportioned around the world,” he said, “and there is absolutely no evidence that there are genetic differences that favor intelligence in any sub-population of human beings.” Then the interviewer gave Watson the opportunity to—almost prodded him to—renounce or abandon some of his previous controversial statements. He didn’t.
The issue is not simply whether we can balance a respect for a person’s achievements with a contempt for their flaws. The more complex issue is whether the achievements and the flaws are interwoven.
Adding to the disgrace was the fact that the World Health Organization had delivered 250,000 diagnostic tests that worked just fine to countries around the world. The U.S. could have gotten some of those tests or replicated them, but it had refused.
