discovery of DNA

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Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Popular narratives tend to centre on individual geniuses coming up with incredible insights in isolation – and those few are disproportionately immigrants. But in fact, most ideas come from creative collisions between people. Take the discovery of DNA, the code of life. English physicist Francis Crick and American biologist James Watson concluded that it consisted of a three-dimensional double helix, based on the earlier discovery of DNA by a Swiss scientist, Friedrich Miescher, developed by Phoebus Levene, a Lithuanian-born American biochemist, and Erwin Chargaff, an Austro-Hungarian one.2 Or consider DeepMind, a London-based company doing groundbreaking practical research on artificial intelligence.

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, Migration Policy Debates 19, OECD, May 2019. https://www.oecd.org/migration/mig/migration-policy-debates-19.pdf 77 The top ten countries in terms of their attractiveness to highly educated workers, before factoring in visa rules, are the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands and the UK. 78 The top ten most attractive OECD countries to highly educated workers are Australia, Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, the US, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Norway. 10 Diversity Dividend 1 Chris Bascombe, ‘Jurgen Klopp delights in diverse personalities of Liverpool’s record-hunting defensive bedrock’, Telegraph, 4 April 2019. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2019/04/04/jurgen-klopp-delights-diverse-personalities-liverpools-record/ 2 Leslie Pray, ‘Discovery of DNA structure and function: Watson and Crick’, Nature Education, 1:1, 2008. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/discovery-of-dna-structure-and-function-watson-397/ 3 David Rowan, ‘DeepMind: inside Google’s super-brain’, Wired, 22 June 2015. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/deepmind 4 Ernest Miguelez, Julio Raffo, Christian Chacua, Massimiliano Coda-Zabetta, Deyun Yin, Francesco Lissoni, Gianluca Tarasconi, ‘Tied in: The Global Network of Local Innovation’, WIPO Economic Research Working Paper 58, November 2019. https://www.wipo.int/publications/en/details.jsp?

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer

3D printing, Albert Einstein, biofilm, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, knapsack problem, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Lyft, microbiome, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, uber lyft

See also vital force/vitalism electrons and electricity and alkaline vent theory, 247 and astrobiology/exobiology research, 265 and Burke’s radiobes, xv and definitions of life, 180–82 discovery of the electron, x, 39 and DNA-reading technology, 229–31 electron microscopes, 207, 256 and flight of bats, 95 and mutation research, 186 and neurons, 4, 7 and organoid research, 13, 15 and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, 236 and superconductivity, 286–87 and vitalism debate, 148–49 elk kelp, 5–6 Ellis, Emory, 187 Elsasser, Walter, 196–97 embryonic development, 23–32, 51, 98, 171 Emergence of Life, The (Burke), xviii emergent properties, 198 Employment for the Microscope (Baker), 45 Enceladus, 260–66 ensoulment, 21 entropy, 190 enzymes and alkaline vent theory, 248 and Amazon molly reproduction, 214–15 and Burke’s radiobes, xv and carnivorous plants, xviii and cellular metabolism, 174 and discovery of DNA, 193 and genetic mutations, 113–14 and metabolic function, 71–72, 74, 82, 87–88 and mitochondria, 212 and origins of life theories, 219, 228, 244 and red blood cells, 212 and ribozymes, 232 and RNA-based drugs, 248–49 and theoretical models of life, 284 and viruses, 207 and vitalism debate, 169–73 and volcanic hot springs research, 239 and yeast cells, 184 Eozoön (dawn animal), 159, 166 erythrocytes, 211–12 Escherichia coli, 115 ether, 172–73 eukaryotes, 113 evolution and Amazon mollies, 213–14 and assembly theory, 288, 291 and astrobiology/exobiology research, 256–57, 257–58, 279 and autocatalytic sets, 286 and awareness of life and death, 39–41 of bats, 96 and Darwin’s research, 157 and definitions of life, 270–71 and Erasmus Darwin, 146 and Gilbert’s RNA research, 233 and hallmarks of life, 124 and hibernation, 94 and human origins, 37 and maple reproduction, 108 and medical research, 111–12 and metabolic function, 67 and natural selection, 114–16, 119, 122–23, 157, 208, 270 and the ocean floor, 157–60 and origins of life theories, 244 and prebiotic chemistry, 224 and Pseudomonas research, 112, 116–24 and radiobes, 167 and recognition of life, 19 and role of mutation, 114, 115–16, 199–200 and single-cell life, 112–13 theory and mechanics of, 113–15 and viruses, 204, 209, 211 and vitalism debate, 172–73 and volcanic hot springs research, 239 exoplanets and exobiology, 199–200, 251–52, 258–59, 277, 290.

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See also astrobiology external memory, 83–84 fermentation, 168–70 fertilization, 107 Feynman, Richard, 287 51 Pegasi, 258 fish reproduction, 213–15, 270 flight, 94–95, 283 Forbes, James, 35 Forterre, Patrick, 209–10 Fortnightly Review, 161–62 fossils and fossil record, 40, 115, 159, 166, 173, 245, 256, 258, 277 Frankenstein (Shelley), 147–48 Franklin, Rosalind, 193–95, 195–96 fruit flies, 185, 219 fungi, 46, 99–101 games, defining, 274 Gao, Richard, 13 Garnier, Simon, 78–83, 87–89 genes and genetics and Amazon mollies, 214–15 and assembly theory, 289–90, 292 and astrobiology/exobiology research, 262, 278 and autocatalytic sets, 284–86 and characteristics of life, 5 and definitions of life, 222, 269–70, 272 and discovery of DNA, 193–95, 195–200 and DNA-reading technology, 230–31, 241–42 and electric charge within cells, 181 and embryonic development, 27–32 genetic disorders, 7–8, 30, 112 and hibernation, 94, 101 and maple trees, 103–10 and metabolic function, 71–76 and mitochondria, 212–13 and mutation research, 184–88 and organic molecules in meteorites, 232–35 and organoid research, 10 of polyps, 133 and prebiotic chemistry, 224–25 and primitive cells, 226–30 and protocells, 243–45 and Pseudomonas research, 112–24 and red blood cells, 212 and RNA-based drugs, 248–49 and Schrödinger’s aperiodic crystals, 188–90 and scientific education, xviii and slime molds, 81, 88 and theoretical models of life, 282, 283–86 and viruses, 204–5, 208–11 and vitamin C production, 175 See also DNA; evolution George, Robert, 27 George III, King of Great Britain, 142 Ghadiri, Reza, 285 Gilbert, Walter, 232–33, 239 global warming, 259 glycine, 217 Goldin, Daniel, 257 Goodall, Jane, 37–38 Goulon, Maurice, 50–51 Green, Sara, 272 guanine, 71, 231 habitable environments, 258–60.

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Supreme Court, 24 valine, 217 Vallortigara, Giorgio, 19 Van Leeuwenhoek, Antonie, 43, 48, 206 Varela, Francisco, 283 vasopressin, 59 ventilators, 51–52, 55, 60 Venus, 251, 252 Viking 1, 253–55, 257 viruses bacteriophages, 122–23, 187, 206, 211 and definitions of life, 203–11, 269, 270, 273–75 and DNA sequencing, 242–43 liposomes in vaccines, 226 and mutation research, 187 and organoid research, 11–12 origins of, 215 polio, 50, 206 and prebiotic chemistry, 224–25 SARS-CoV-2, 204–9 virocells, 209–10 virome, 211 vital force/vitalism and abortion debate, 23 and alkaline vent theory, 247 and autocatalytic sets, 285 and cell function, 169–73 and discovery of DNA, 195, 196–98 and irritability, 145 and organic/inorganic divide, 150 and origins of life theories, 219 and protoplasm, 161–62 and Shelley’s Frankenstein, 147–49 and Urschleim, 158 vital tripod, 42, 49–51 vitamin C, 175 vivisection experiments, 42–43, 138 volcanic hot springs research, 216–17, 236–39, 243–44, 247 Voytek, Bradley, 13 Waddington, Conrad, 198 Walker, Sara, 287–92 Washington hawthorn, 102 Washington Post, 25 water, 46–47, 281, 282 Watson, James, 193–95 wave functions, 188 Westall, Frances, 271 What Is Life?

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

We believe, though, that the most important effect of these technologies will be in assisting people to do what they are unable to do today, vastly expanding the problems we can solve and creating new spheres of innovation for every industry. And like previous eras of computing, this will take a tremendous amount of innovation over decades. “These new capabilities will affect everything. It will be like the discovery of DNA,” predicts Ralph Gomory, a pioneer of applied mathematics who was director of IBM Research in the 1970s and 1980s and later head of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.6 HOW COGNITIVE SYSTEMS WILL HELP US BE SMARTER As smart as human beings are, there are many things that we can’t do or simply can’t process in time to affect the outcome of a situation.

The Linguist: A Personal Guide to Language Learning by Steve Kaufmann

borderless world, British Empire, discovery of DNA, financial independence, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, language acquisition, South China Sea, trade liberalization, urban sprawl

Samuel Beckett, an Irishman, wrote one of the prominent plays of modern French literature, Waiting for Godot. There are many outstanding nonEuropean virtuosos performing European classical music. Many non-Asians dedicate themselves with success to Asian arts or traditional sports. The Fundamental Similarity of Human Beings With the discovery of DNA, we now understand what the Taoists knew intuitively: all is one. Human beings are remarkably uniform and have a common origin. As Richard Dawkins brilliantly explains in River Out of Eden, our genes have been handed down to us by those of our ancestors who survived long enough to produce children.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

., “November 8, 1895: Roentgen’s Discovery of X-Rays,” This Month in Physics History series, American Physical Society News 10, no. 10 (November 2001), www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200111/history.cfm. For DNA, see Leslie A. Pray, “Discovery of DNA Structure and Function: Watson and Crick,” Nature Education 1, no. 1 (2008): 100, www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/discovery-of-dna-structure-and-function-watson-397. For oxygen, see Julia Davis, “Discovering Oxygen, a Brief History,” Mental Floss, August 1, 2012, http://mentalfloss.com/article/31358/discovering-oxygen-brief-history. For penicillin, see Theodore C.

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

And when an organism matured, it generated male or female semen again—transforming material back to message. In fact, rather than Pythagoras’s triangle, there was a circle, or a cycle, at work: form begat information, and then information begat form. Centuries later, the biologist Max Delbrück would joke that Aristotle should have been given the Nobel Prize posthumously—for the discovery of DNA. But if heredity was transmitted as information, then how was that information encoded? The word code comes from the Latin caudex, the wooden pith of a tree on which scribes carved their writing. What, then, was the caudex of heredity? What was being transcribed, and how? How was the material packaged and transported from one body to the next?

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., Wise Sayings: For Your Thoughtful Consideration (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2012), 89. “The Fess”: “The Oswald T. Avery Collection: Biographical information,” National Institutes of Health, http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Narrative/CC/p-nid/35. No one knew or understood the chemical structure: Robert C. Olby, The Path to the Double Helix: The Discovery of DNA (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 107. Swiss biochemist, Friedrich Miescher: George P. Sakalosky, Notio Nova: A New Idea (Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance, 2014), 58. extremely “unsophisticated” structure: Olby, Path to the Double Helix, 89. “stupid molecule”: Garland Allen and Roy M. MacLeod, eds., Science, History and Social Activism: A Tribute to Everett Mendelsohn, vol. 228 (Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media, 2013), 92.

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The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity. New York: Holt, 1915. ———. The Physical Basis of Heredity. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1919. Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. A Cultural History of Heredity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Olby, Robert C. The Path to the Double Helix: The Discovery of DNA. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Paley, William. The Works of William Paley. Philadelphia: J. J. Woodward, 1836. Patterson, Paul H. The Origins of Schizophrenia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Portugal, Franklin H., and Jack S. Cohen. A Century of DNA: A History of the Discovery of the Structure and Function of the Genetic Substance.

Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

In Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Bruce Alberts, a biochemist, had a series of editorials on science education.18 What he points out is quite interesting. He says science education is increasingly being designed with the effect of killing any interest in science. If you are in college, maybe you have to memorize a bunch of enzymes or something. If you are in elementary school, you memorize the periodic table. When you study the discovery of DNA, you’re just taught what scientists already discovered. You memorize the fact that DNA is a double helix. Science is being taught in a way that kills any joy in science, gives you no sense of what discovery is. It’s the opposite of Weisskopf’s view that it matters what you discover, not what you cover.

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, post-materialism, Recombinant DNA, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

., ‘Programmable RNA recognition and cleavage by CRISPR/Cas9’ Nature, vol. 516, 2014, pp. 263–6. Olby, R., ‘Schrödinger’s problem: What is life?’, Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 4, 1971, pp. 119–48. Olby, R., ‘Avery in retrospect’, Nature, vol. 238, 1972, pp. 295–6. Olby, R., The Path to the Double Helix: The Discovery of DNA, New York, Dover, 1994. Olby, R., ‘Quiet debut for the double helix’, Nature, vol. 421, 2003, pp. 402–5. Olby, R., Francis Crick: Hunter of Life’s Secrets, Plainview, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2009. Olby, R. and Posner, R., ‘An early reference to genetic coding’, Nature, vol. 215, 1967, p. 556.

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., ‘Imre Festetics and the Sheep Breeders’ Society of Moravia: Mendel’s forgotten “research network”‘, PLoS Biology, vol. 12, 2014, article e1001772. Pollister, A. W., Hewson, S. and Alfert, M., ‘Studies on the desoxypentose nucleic acid content of animal nuclei’, Journal of Cellular Physiology, vol. 38 (Suppl. 1), 1951, pp. 101–19. Pollock, M. R., ‘The discovery of DNA: An ironic tale of chance, prejudice and insight’, Journal of General Microbiology, vol. 63, 1970, pp. 1–20. Polyanski, A, A., Hlevnjal, M. and Zagrovic, B., ‘Proteome-wide analysis reveals clues of complementary interactions between mRNAs and their cognate proteins as the physicochemical foundation of the genetic code’, RNA Biology, vol. 10, 2013, pp. 1248–54.

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

In most cases when a fundamental force in the universe is first formally understood by science, there is a lag between that understanding and the emergence of popular technologies that depend on the science for their existence. Newton’s law of universal gravitation didn’t immediately spawn a craze for gadgets built on his equations. Even in today’s accelerated world, it took at least two generations for Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA to engender mainstream technologies such as DNA tests. But with electricity, the two phenomena overlapped: you had the discovery of one of nature’s most fundamental forces, and you had an immediate flood of mesmerizing parlor tricks. You had awe-inspiring scientific genius, and you had gadgets, all in one swoop.

Retire Before Mom and Dad by Rob Berger

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, car-free, cuban missile crisis, discovery of DNA, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, hedonic treadmill, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, robo advisor, The 4% rule, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Use one-half of your tax refund to increase your Saving Rate. * * * 38 I should hasten to add that some would disagree with this claim, or at least be quick to give credit to Friedrich Miescher, Phoebus Levene, Erwin Chargaff, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/discovery-of-dna-structure-and-function-watson-397 39 https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins 3 Key Concepts Small wins enable us to focus on goals that are achievable in a reasonable amount of time. Called The Progress Principle, seeing regular improvements, however small, builds our confidence and encourages us to keep moving toward bigger goals.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and by a competitive desire to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help make what Watson, with his typical grandiosity cloaked in the pretense of humility, would later tell her was the most important biological advance since the double helix. Darwin Mendel CHAPTER 2 The Gene Darwin The paths that led Watson and Crick to the discovery of DNA’s structure were pioneered a century earlier, in the 1850s, when the English naturalist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species and Gregor Mendel, an underemployed priest in Brno (now part of the Czech Republic), began breeding peas in the garden of his abbey. The beaks of Darwin’s finches and the traits of Mendel’s peas gave birth to the idea of the gene, an entity inside of living organisms that carries the code of heredity.1 Darwin had originally planned to follow the career path of his father and grandfather, who were distinguished doctors.

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After fifty years, he has been banished from meetings, and the oil portrait of him removed. He is now sentenced to internal exile, living with his wife, Elizabeth, in elegant but tortured isolation at the northern end of the campus in a pale Palladian-style mansion called Ballybung. His troubles began in 2003, when he marked the fiftieth anniversary of his co-discovery of DNA’s structure by giving an interview for a documentary on PBS and the BBC. Genetic engineering should someday be used to “cure” people who have low intelligence, he said. “If you really are stupid, I would call that a disease.” It reflected his deep belief, perhaps fostered by pride in his seminal scientific discovery as well as the daily angst of living with his schizophrenic son, Rufus, in the power of DNA to explain human nature.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

All of man’s recorded history took place as an inch was deposited. All of organized science a millimeter. All we know of genetics, a few tens of microns. If we remember that timescale, then what vision can seem too long?”14 Then he said this: The dramatic advances of the past few decades have led to the discovery of DNA and to the decipherment of the universal hereditary code, the age-old language of the living cell. And with this understanding will come control of processes that have known only the mindless discipline of natural selection for two billion years. And now the impact of science will strike straight home, for the biological world includes us.

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., “Cas9–crRNA ribonucleoprotein complex mediates specific DNA cleavage for adaptive immunity in bacteria,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, (2012): E2579–E2586, https://www.pnas.org/content/109/39/E2579?iss=39. 18. Sarah Zhang, “The Battle Over Genome Editing Gets Science All Wrong,” WIRED, April 18, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/10/battle-genome-editing-gets-science-wrong/. 19. R. Dahm, “Friedrich Miescher and the Discovery of DNA,” Developmental Biology 278, (2005); 274–288, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2004.11.028. 20. Stuart Firestein, “Fundamentally Newsworthy,” The Edge.org, 2016, “Youtube, https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26718. 21. TEDx Talks, “O(ú)pravy lidské DNA | Martin Jínek | TEDx Třinec,” YouTube video, 21:07, last viewed June 26, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles by Bruce H. Lipton

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, correlation does not imply causation, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Mars Rover, nocebo, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, sugar pill

Once it was known that you needed nothing other than DNA to pass on traits, the DNA molecule became a scientific superstar. It was now left to Watson and Crick to unravel the structure and function of that superstar molecule. DNA molecules are long and threadlike. They are made from four nitrogen-containing chemicals called bases (adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, or A, T, C, and G). Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA’s structure led to the fact that the sequence of the A, T, C, and G bases in DNA spells out the sequence of amino acids along a protein’s backbone (Watson and Crick 1953). Those long strings of DNA molecules can be subdivided into single genes, segments that provide the blueprint for specific proteins.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Garrett Hardin, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Northern Rock, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, quantum entanglement, short selling, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, Virgin Galactic

So the Gaia concept was born at the peak of the New Age – contemporary with Woodstock and the Beatles, which perhaps accounts for why so many scientists still regard it as part of the plethora of New Age nonsense which was around at the time. But not all of us were hippies with our rock chicks. There was the space programme that culminated with the moon landings, a surge of planetary exploration by orbiting satellites, and the discovery of DNA and the genetic code. The 1960s saw the near catastrophic confrontation between the superpowers over missiles sited on Cuba, and the end of segregation in the USA and much violent political change; it was a time of painful conflict between old and new views of the world. Apart from the coincidence of its birth with the New Age, Gaia science was far too revolutionary an idea to be immediately accepted, and I should not have expected this until a substantial quantity of evidence and theory had been gathered; it was not in fact until thirty‐six years later, in 2001, that the concept received partial public recognition.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

I believed that with the creation of synthetic life from chemicals, we had finally put to rest any remaining notions of vitalism once and for all. But it seems that I had underestimated the extent to which a belief in vitalism still pervades modern scientific thinking. Belief is the enemy of scientific advancement. The belief that proteins were the genetic material set back the discovery of DNA as the information-carrier, perhaps by as much as half a century. During the latter half of the twentieth century we came to understand that DNA was Schrödinger’s “code-script,” deciphered its complex message, and began to figure out precisely how it guides the processes of life. This epic adventure in understanding would mark the birth of a new era of science, one that lay at the nexus of biology and technology. 3 Dawn of the Digital Age of Biology If we are right, and of course that is not yet proven, then it means that nucleic acids are not merely structurally important but functionally active substances in determining the biochemical activities and specific characteristics of cells and that by means of a known chemical substance it is possible to induce predictable and hereditary changes in cells.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Biohack excitement is still a geeky-guy homerun. The websites, the reading material, the vision, the propaganda, are overwhelmingly male-authored and male-centric. The same is true of transhumanism, and its follow-up, post-humanism. The Palo Alto Longevity Prize homepage includes Watson and Crick, re: the discovery of DNA, but makes no mention of Rosalind Franklin, whose crucial X-ray, photo 51, was central to the breakthrough. Things change. Things don’t change. There are exceptions. Scholar and futurist Donna J. Haraway wrote A Cyborg Manifesto back in 1985. Like the late, great writer Ursula K. Le Guin, Haraway believed that women should embrace the alternative human future.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

Yet it is striking that a humble activity like picking blackberries—the subject of well-known poems by, among others, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Wilbur—appears to be more inspirational to modern poets, more charged with interest and significance, than, say, the construction of the world’s tallest building, the Oscar ceremonies, the space program, or the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure. One might even say that it has now become an established function of art to help us discover the remarkable in the commonplace. This, after all, is one effect of art that uses “found objects,” such as Duchamp’s sculpture Bicycle Wheel in which a bicycle wheel is mounted above a wooden stool.

P53: The Gene That Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong

Asilomar, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Kickstarter, mouse model, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, stem cell, trade route

We got to repeat people’s experiments from the literature and even try some new things. People stayed in the lab late at night; she had us over to her house to talk, and what did we talk about? We talked about science! It was terrifically infectious for me. This was probably 1959 – only six years after Watson and Crick and their discovery of DNA structure. So the molecular biology revolution was just starting.’ Levine began his career studying how viruses replicate themselves – essentially by taking over the machinery of the host cell to do so, because they are parasites that cannot function outside of other living things, be they plant or animal.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Or to take another example, the flimsy, cross-platform nature of HTML is precisely what gives it its power as a protocological standard. Like Empire, if protocol dared to centralize, or dared to hierarchize, or dared to essentialize, it would fail. Further to these many theoretical interventions—Foucault, Deleuze, Kittler, Mandel, Castells, Jameson, Hardt and Negri—are many dates that roughly confirm my periodization: the discovery of DNA in 1953; the economic crisis in the West during the 1970s epitomized by President Richard Nixon’s decoupling of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard on August 17, 1971 (and thus the symbolic evaporation of the Bretton Woods agreement); Charles Jencks’s claim that modern architecture ended on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 P.M.; the ARPAnet’s mandatory rollover to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the crashing of AT&T’s long-distance 46.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

On being open-minded and curious: A good resource is David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (New York: Riverhead, 2019). On Rousseau’s social contract: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1968). On the discovery of DNA’s structure: James Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York: Athenaeum, 1968). See also: “The Answer,” Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA, Oregon State University Libraries, accessed November 10, 2015, http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/dna/narrative/page30.html.

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, carbon-based life, clean water, cloud computing, deep learning, different worldview, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Hawkins, PalmPilot, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, Turing test

But, as far as I know, Mountcastle was the first person to clearly and carefully lay out the argument for a common cortical algorithm. Mountcastle’s and Darwin’s proposals differ in one interesting way. Darwin knew what the algorithm was: evolution is based on random variation and natural selection. However, Darwin didn’t know where the algorithm was in the body. This was not known until the discovery of DNA many years later. Mountcastle, by contrast, didn’t know what the cortical algorithm was; he didn’t know what the principles of intelligence were. But he did know where this algorithm resided in the brain. So, what was Mountcastle’s proposal for the location of the cortical algorithm? He said that the fundamental unit of the neocortex, the unit of intelligence, was a “cortical column.”

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

Nature as a 3D Printer of Biological Material One thing we haven’t been able to print (yet) are organic materials, which contain carbon, the basic building block of life. An organic 3D printer is not as far off as we might think, and it could be used to print organs or, in the case of some science fiction-like scenarios, actual living organisms. The discovery of DNA and genes, which were theorized long before physical genes were found, seemed to reveal that the building blocks of living things are, in fact, also based on information. The information in DNA in the form of genes acts as instructions for the body of the organism to build proteins, which are the building blocks of the cells in the body.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

For convenience we will term this model audience selection, after natural selection in biology. The label of audience selection may sound empowering, even meritocratic. But in fact, audiences rarely get to choose among many equally good options. Darwin’s account left out many key details, and indeed it was written a century before the discovery of dna. But it still carried enormous power to connect macroscale biology—species and ecosystems—with the pressures on individual organisms. In Darwin’s account, his eureka moment came while reading Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that society is doomed to outstrip its food supply because human population grows geometrically.

Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner Loewenstein

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, informal economy, information trail, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, Richard Feynman, stem cell, trade route, Turing machine

Digital demons, 127, 128 plants and, 128–130 rise of, 127–128 Digital electrical signals evolutionary beginning of, 35, 36 generation of, 54–56, 88, 127, 210, 211, 212n, 213, 278 synchronization of, 222 Diodes, tunnel, 103 Dipoles, 40 (fig.), 63 (fig.), 69, 70, 97 Dirac, Paul, 153, 241 Disparity, visual, 176–178, 179 Distributed coding, 200–202, 273 Distributive law of coding, 61 Divergent mapping, 92 (fig.), 98 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) compounded scripts of, 113 discovery of DNA structure as an example of sensory transcendence, 152–153 error suppressing loops in information transmission to protein, 111–112, 113n, 114 human and mouse scripts, 115 large-scale rearrangements in, 118–121 mutations of, 109–113, 115, 117 number of genes contained in, 91 number of odor-sensing genes in, 89 Dowling, John E., 281 Dyson, F.

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain by António R. Damásio

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discovery of DNA, experimental subject, longitudinal study, mandelbrot fractal, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, social intelligence, theory of mind

But other work can be carried out only in humans, with the appropriate ethical cautions and limitations, and the pace must be slower. Some have asked why neuroscience has not yet achieved results as spectacular as those seen in molecular biology over the past four decades. Some have even asked what is the neuroscientific equivalent of the discovery of DNA structure, and whether or not a corresponding neuroscientific fact has been established. There is no such single correspondence, although some facts, at several levels of the nervous system, might be construed as comparable in practical value to knowing the structure of DNA—for instance, understanding what an action potential is all about.

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity by Robert Lane Greene

anti-communist, British Empire, centre right, discovery of DNA, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Parag Khanna, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Beginning in the middle of the last millennium, the European powers became the world’s undeniable masters of technology and modern development. Later, their New-World offspring, and especially the United States, would join them in global dominance. From ocean-crossing vessels to railroads, from the telegraph to the telephone, from radio to television to the Internet, from the discovery of oxygen to the discovery of DNA, countries speaking European languages led the way in the world’s modernization. This was unsatisfactory for two other kinds of societies. Postcolonial states born in the twentieth century wanted to show the world that they were every bit as sovereign as the countries that had formerly defeated, dominated, or colonized them.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Ultimately, we will probably need to pursue all these approaches simultaneously, attempting to converge on an understanding of how people behave and how the world works both from above and from below, bringing to bear every method and resource that we have at our disposal. It sounds like a lot of work, and it will be. But as Merton noted four decades ago, we have done this kind of thing before, first in physics and then in biology and then again in medical science. Most recently, the genomics revolution that began more than fifty years ago with the discovery of DNA has long promised more in the way of medical treatments than it has been able to deliver; yet that hasn’t stopped us from devoting enormous resources to the pursuit of science.26 Why should the science required to understand social problems such as urban poverty or economic development or public education deserve less attention?

Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome by Nessa Carey

dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kickstarter, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs

For instance, the neurons in the brain express the receptors for neurotransmitters but switch off the genes for haemoglobin, the pigment that carries oxygen in our red blood cells. These are all examples of situations we have referred to for decades as epigenetic phenomena. Yes, exactly the same word as for the modifications, and it makes sense. These are all situations where something else is happening in addition to, or as well as, the genetic code. The discovery of DNA methylation finally gave us a mechanism to understand how epigenetic phenomena happen. In a neuron, the genes responsible for producing haemoglobin become heavily methylated and are switched off. They stay switched off through life. In the cells that give rise to red blood cells, however, these genes are not methylated and haemoglobin is created.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

He overate, told off-color jokes, and did his best work in noisy and chaotic environments. In the 1940s, von Neumann figured out the logical requirements for self-replication. He described a computational “machine” that could make copies of itself, allow for errors, and evolve. This remarkable work preceded computers and anticipated the later discovery of DNA and the mechanisms of life. His work was theoretical, but it created a roadmap for building actual self-replicating machines.24 Perhaps this is the way we will eventually explore the galaxy. Diffusing through interstellar space and exploring distant worlds with a fleet of self-replicating probes sounds fantastical, but it could be achieved with a reasonable extrapolation of our current technology.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

H. C. Crick, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Nature 171 (1953): 737–38, http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf and “Double Helix: 50 Years of DNA,” Nature archive, http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/archive.xhtml. 6. Franklin died in 1958 and the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA was awarded in 1962. There is controversy as to whether or not she would have shared in that prize had she been alive in 1962. 7. Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905). This paper established the special theory of relativity. See Robert Bruce Lindsay and Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1981), 330. 8.

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

p 79: Regarding the rapid acceptance of Einstein’s ideas, it helped that leading scientists such as Lorentz and Poincaré arrived at similar conclusions at about the same time. But although Einstein’s formulation of relativity was even more radical than the formulations of Lorentz and Poincaré, it quickly became accepted as the correct way to think about relativity. p 79: On the discovery of DNA, and Pauling’s error, see Watson’s memoir, The Double Helix [234]. p 80 “If Feynman says it three times, it’s right”: [72]. p 84: My thanks to Mark Tovey for help constructing this example on optical illusions and cognitive science. p 85: On collaboration markets, see also [246] and [146].

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert, Catherine Green

Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, global pandemic, imposter syndrome, lockdown, lone genius, profit motive, Skype, social distancing, TikTok

Dr Cath Green is Associate Professor in Chromosome Dynamics at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, a Senior Research Fellow at Exeter College, and Head of Oxford University’s Clinical BioManufacturing Facility. As a specialist in manufacturing vaccines for clinical trials, she is an integral part of the Oxford Vaccine project. ‘This is one of the most epic and pioneering moments in human history, comparable to the race to put a man on the moon, the discovery of DNA, or the first ascent of Everest. The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is a triumph and its creators are life savers. Science is the exit strategy, as long as we make that science equitably available to the world – as all the incredible people behind the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine always intended. Truly the “People’s Vaccine”.’

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

Just when animal electricity should have taken the spotlight once more, a cloud passed over the sun. No sooner had Hodgkin and Huxley revealed the elusive mechanism of the nerve impulse, than two other young researchers stole the show with a discovery deemed far more monumental: the double helix. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick—and Rosalind Franklin—unveiled their discovery of DNA. “There are only molecules. Everything else is sociology,” Watson pronounced,10 and the importance of bioelectricity was sidelined by a “bigger” discovery once again, just as it had been after Galvani. Hodgkin and Huxley had shown that an action potential depends crucially on a cell holding tight to potassium and expelling sodium.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

Audience members pointed out that the experimental method is the brainchild of white Victorian males.' Carrying conciliation to what would have seemed to me almost superhuman lengths, Ellsworth agreed that white males had done their share of damage in the world but noted that, none the less, their efforts had led to the discovery of DNA. This earned the incredulous (and incredible) retort: 'You believe in DNA?' Fortunately, there are still many intelligent young women prepared to enter a scientific career, and I should like to pay tribute to their courage, in the face of uncouth bullying of this kind. Of course a form of feminist influence in science is admirable and overdue.

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Playing the Long Game The commercialization of technology developed by basic science research typically takes about fifty years. The great discoveries that were made in relativity and quantum mechanics during the first decade of the twentieth century gave rise to CD players, GPS, and computers in the second half of that century. The discovery of DNA and the genetic code in the 1950s gave rise to applications in medicine and agribusiness that are having an economic impact today. The basic discoveries that the BRAIN Initiative and other brain research programs around the world are making today will lead to applications fifty years from now that would be considered science fiction today.13 We can expect AIs to have operating systems comparable to the one in our brain by 2050.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Guardian, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/23/ai-apocalypse-facebook-algorithms 6These contributions include ‘von Neumann entropy’, and it was in fact von Neumann who suggested the metaphorical name ‘entropy’ to Shannon as he developed information theory. 7It is now widely recognized that female scientist Rosalind Franklin deserves credit along with Watson and Crick for the discovery of DNA. 8G.E.P. Box and N.R. Draper, 1969, Evolutionary Operation: A Statistical Method for Process Improvement. New York: Wiley. 9Kenneth De Jong, David Fogel and Hans-Paul Schwefel, 1997, A History of Evolutionary Computation. In T. Bäck, D.B. Fogel and Z. Michalewicz (eds) Handbook of Evolutionary Computation.

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson

Apollo 11, Arthur D. Levinson, Atul Gawande, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cepheid variable, Columbine, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Magellanic Cloud, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, phenotype, profit motive, seminal paper, stem cell

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/66/1699/84.short] 2. discovered in his monastery garden: An English translation of Gregor Mendel’s landmark paper, “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” (1865), can be found online at MendelWeb. [http://www.mendelweb.org/Mendel.html] 3. That kind of clarity: The experiments by Avery, Hershey, and Chase, and the discovery of DNA’s double-helical structure, are described in Horace Freeland Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology, expanded ed. (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1996). The seminal papers include Oswald T. Avery, Colin M. MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty, “Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types,” The Journal of Experimental Medicine 79, no. 2 (February 1, 1944): 137–58 [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2135445]; A.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Isaac Newton famously wrote. Many of today’s intellectual property laws make these metaphorical “shoulders” off-limits, by forbidding not only profit from another’s innovation but also any research based on it (at least not without providing compensation). Think of all the research that has been based on the discovery of DNA. Imagine how subsequent research would have been impeded if Watson and Crick had barred the use of what they learned or had charged a high fee for its use. Innovation can also be mired in conflicting patent claims. In the field of technology, innovators often have to wade through what has come to be called a patent thicket.

CRISPR People by Henry T. Greely

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, clean water, CRISPR, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Gregor Mendel, Ian Bogost, Isaac Newton, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, special economic zone, stem cell, synthetic biology, traumatic brain injury, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

This chapter looks at those discussions up to the disclosure of He’s experiment, in two parts: the early discussions of recombinant DNA technology, notably at the famous Asilomar Conference, and the more focused discussions after the development of CRISPR as a genome editing system. Along the way, it takes a look at some of the people, “CRISPR people,” although not “CRISPR’d people,” who were involved. Asilomar and the Ethics of Recombinant DNA Before the realization that DNA was the basis for human genetic inheritance and the knowledge, with Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA’s structure, of the importance of DNA sequence, the discussion would not have been of “editing,” as the analogy between the genome and a book (or a blueprint) did not exist. But even after Watson and Crick, and after the working out during the 1960s of how DNA in the genome “coded for” the amino acids of proteins, the discussion remained abstract.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein

autism spectrum disorder, biofilm, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of DNA, double helix, epigenetics, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, helicopter parent, hygiene hypothesis, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind

* * * — Following the discovery of the DNA double helix, there emerged a conflation of “evolutionary” traits with “genetic” traits. The terms evolutionary and genetic began to be used interchangeably, which made it more and more difficult, over time, to talk about evolutionary change that was not genetic. Darwin, had he been aware of Gregor Mendel’s work with peas, or had he been around to see the discovery of DNA, would have been pleased to know a mechanism of adaptation by natural selection, but he would not, we believe, have assumed that this was the only such mechanism. The conflation of evolutionary with genetic traits became entrenched in popular culture, as in the specious dichotomy of “nature versus nurture.”

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

He shows that there are numerous such mountains – different kinds of eyes in different kinds of animal, from the compound eyes of insects to the multiple and peculiar eyes of spiders – each with a distinct range of partially developed stages showing how one can go step by step. Computer models confirm that there is nothing to suggest any of the stages would confer a disadvantage. Moreover, the digitisation of biology since the discovery of DNA provides direct and unambiguous evidence of gradual evolution by the progressive alteration of the sequence of letters in genes. We now know that the very same gene, called Pax6, triggers the development of both the compound eye of insects and the simple eye of human beings. The two kinds of eye were inherited from a common ancestor.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

So it stands to reason that intellectual property regimes that create monopoly rents that impede access to health both create inequality and hamper growth more generally. There are alternatives. Advocates of intellectual property rights have overemphasized their role in promoting innovation. Most of the key innovations—from the basic ideas underlying the computer, to transistors, to lasers, to the discovery of DNA—were not motivated by pecuniary gain.They were motivated by the quest for knowledge. Of course, resources have to be made available. But the patent system is only one way, and often not the best way, of providing these resources. Government-financed research, foundations, and the prize system (which offers a prize to whoever makes a discovery, and then makes the knowledge widely available, using the power of the market to reap the benefits) are alternatives, with major advantages, and without the inequality-increasing disadvantages of the current intellectual property rights system.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

No, it’s not, but it needs to be modernized. Eighty years of research has built on and enhanced Coase’s findings since “The Nature of the Firm” appeared. Continuing to rely on it alone is a bit like treating Gregor Mendel’s mid-nineteenth-century work as the last word on genetics and ignoring Watson and Crick, the discovery of DNA, and everything that came after. No Matter How Smart They Get, Contracts Will Still Be Incomplete Of the many elaborations of TCE, those that are most relevant here are the concepts of incomplete contracts and residual rights of control. In pathbreaking work, Sandy Grossman and Oliver Hart asked, “What rights does the owner of a firm have that a non-owner doesn’t?”

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Their ancestors pioneered the early Earth, and they retain some of the necessary skills, but they are by no means the ideal candidates for pioneering new worlds. However, since the domestication of the dog, twenty thousand years ago, humans have practiced modification of other species to meet our needs, primarily through the practice of selective breeding. In recent years, a series of advances—first the development of genetics, then the discovery of DNA, and now the actual reading of the genetic code and mastery of recombinant DNA techniques—has enormously expanded our abilities in this area. As a result, it will soon be within our capabilities to design ideal pioneering microorganisms and ultraefficient plants well suited to transform a wide variety of extraterrestrial environments.

Human Nature: The Categorial Framework by P. M. S. Hacker

conceptual framework, discovery of DNA, move 37, profit maximization

It is rooted in Locke’s distinction between real and nominal essence but, unlike Locke, holds the real essence of a thing to be both discoverable and partly constitutive of the meaning of its name. It draws support from the discovery of the periodic table of elements, and, even more questionably, from the discovery of DNA and its genetic role. It is doubtful whether the categories found to be useful in the natural sciences are themselves natural kind terms thus understood. For this conception of natural kinds is a metaphysical rather than a scientific one, rooted in a form of metaphysical essentialism, on the one hand, and misconceptions concerning meaning and explanation, on the other.9 It is an illusion that scientific discovery can disclose what the words we use, such as ‘gold’ and ‘water’, ‘fish’ and ‘lily’, really mean.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

One can find to the literature such ideological terms as "oppressive," "sexist," "imperialist," "capitalist," "control," and "order" being attached to physical concepts as DNA, genetics, biochemistry, and evolution. The nadir of this secular form of creationism came at a 1997 interdisciplinary conference in which a psychologist was defending science against a beating by science critics by praising the advances in modern genetics, beginning with the 1953 discovery of DNA, He was asked rhetorically: "You believe in DNA?" Certainly this is about as ridiculous as it gets, yet I can understand the concerns of the left, given the checkered history of abuse of evolutionary theory in general, and eugenics in particular. I am equally horrified at how some people have used Darwin to control, subjugate, or even destroy others.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, back-to-the-land, Claude Shannon: information theory, correlation does not imply causation, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Danny Hillis, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, domesticated silver fox, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, invisible hand, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, phenotype, precautionary principle, Thomas Malthus

If, say, some weird, anomalous microbes called the harumscaryotes were discovered, which didn’t use DNA at all, or didn’t use proteins, or used proteins but strung them together from a different set of amino acids from the familiar twenty, or which used DNA but not a triplet code, or a triplet code but not the same 64-word dictionary – if any of these conditions were met, we might suggest that life had originated twice: once for the harumscaryotes and once for the rest of life. For all Darwin knew – indeed, for all anyone knew before the discovery of DNA – some existing creatures might have had the properties I have here attributed to the harumscaryotes, in which case his ‘into a few forms’ would have been justified. Is it possible that two independent origins of life could both have hit upon the same 64-word code? Very unlikely. For that to be plausible, the existing code would have to have strong advantages over alternative codes, and there would have to be a gradual ramp of improvement towards it, a ramp for natural selection to climb up.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Moreover, an Italian immigrant called Antonio Meucci had declared his invention of a ‘voice telegraphy device’ fully five years earlier, but he had lacked the $10 that was required to register his work. So the telephone would surely have arrived with or without Bell, because the sum of intelligence in the mid-1870s could clearly deliver it. The same could be said of the theory of natural selection, the discovery of DNA’s double helix and even the theory of relativity. Most of the arguments over patents take place because two inventors arrive independently at the same conclusion; and this happens because they both have access to the same stock of knowledge. Obviously, entrepreneurship remains important. Each individual innovator will face specific uncertainties in commercialising his or her innovative advance.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

If Schrödinger couldn’t exactly answer the question of what life is, his book arguably did everything else but that. It’s credited with being a key influencer of the development of scientific thought in the twentieth century and helped lay the groundwork for the emergence of molecular biology and the discovery of DNA. E. Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1944). 2. V. L. Schramm and S. D. Schwartz, “Promoting Vibrations and the Function of Enzymes. Emerging Theoretical and Experimental Convergence,” Biochemistry 57, no. 24 (June 19, 2018): 3299–308, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29608286. 3.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Is Pluto a ‘real’ planet even though it is smaller than some of the moons in our solar system? Is Jupiter really not a planet but an un-ignited star? It is not important. What is important is what is really there. And memes are really there, regardless of what we call them or how we classify them. Just as the basic theory of genes was developed long before the discovery of DNA, so today, without knowing how ideas are stored in brains, we do know that some ideas can be passed from one person to another and affect people’s behaviour. Memes are those ideas. Another line of criticism is that memes, unlike genes, are not stored in identical physical forms in every holder.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

., 6.1, 6.2 Fuchs, Christopher, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 Fuchs, Ulrich Gabor, Dennis Galileo, 1.1, 1.2, 3.1 galvanometer, 5.1, 5.2 games, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 8.6 game theory Gamow, George, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 Gauss, Carl Friedrich General Electric genetics altruistic behavior and, 10.1, 10.2 aperiodic crystal model of, 9.1, 10.1 coding system, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10 development of scientific concepts of, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 discovery of DNA, 10.1, 10.2 gene structure and function, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14 genome mapping as information science, prl.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7 information storage in, 7.1, 7.2 memetics and Schrödinger’s formulation of, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 selfish gene concept, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 11.1 symbolic logic to describe, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Gerard, Ralph, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 Gibbs, Willard Gibson, William Gilgamesh Gilliver, Peter, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 Glossographia: or a Dictionary (Blount), 3.1, 3.2 Gödel, Kurt, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 10.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, epl.1 Gödel’s Proof (Nagel, Newman) Godfather (film) “Gold Bug, The” (Poe) Gongsun Long Google, 11.1, 14.1, 14.2, 15.1, epl.1, epl.2 Gould, Glenn, 12.1, 12.2 Gould, Stephen Jay gravity, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1 Gray, Elisha Great Exhibition of 1851 (London) Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 12.1 Greece, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 Grover, Lov Guare, John, epl.1, epl.2 Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan) Guyot, Jules Hamilton, W.

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Niels Reimers, interview by author, Nov. 5, 2014. 10. All Cohen description from Stanley Cohen, ROHO interview, including the Falkow introduction. 11. Stanford Medical History Flickr photo stream and Stanford Daily, May 1974. 12. Cohen explains in his ROHO interview, “Our discoveries were dependent partly on the earlier discovery of DNA ligase and on ten years of basic research with plasmids.” He specifically cites work by Paul Berg, Dale Kaiser, H. Gobind Khorana, D. A. Jackson, Paul Lobban, Janet Mertz, Vittorio Sgaramella, R. H. Symons, and J. H. van de Sande. 13. Reimers, ROHO interview. 14. Stanford had an institutional patent agreement with the National Institutes of Health that fell under the purview of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. 15.

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Leduc also coined the term “synthetic biology” in 1911 and proposed that this field of study would provide insights into the origins of life and cell organization. Over the twentieth century, research by scientists such as Alexander Oparin and Sidney Fox delved deeper into the search for chemical processes that could have led to the formation of cellular life. However, the discovery of DNA and the new field of biotechnology in the second half of the twentieth century looked to genetics as the key to understanding life. Genetics became the main focus for biological research, though there is much common ground emerging between these scientific fields as researchers are applying their knowledge of the genetic code to create artificial life.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

A cell carries out a series of chemical reactions to translate a gene’s sequence of bases into a protein. A cell first makes a copy of the gene, creating a single-stranded series of bases called ribonucleic acid, or RNA. That RNA molecule is taken up by a molecular factory called a ribosome, which reads the sequence of RNA and builds a corresponding protein. The discovery of DNA seemed to reduce heredity to a reliably simple recipe. It came down to turning one DNA molecule into a pair. A cell’s molecular machinery pulled apart the two strands of a DNA molecule and then assembled a new strand to accompany each of them. Each base could bond only to one other: A to T, C to G.

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The number of protein structures we’ll get a year will be measured in the thousands.” The twentieth century began with a revolution sparked by the microscope, which opened humanity’s eyes upon the world of gyrating, fiercely active germs. The Germ Theory was the engine that drove biology for half a century of published health discovery and triumph. With the 1953 discovery of DNA and, perhaps more critically, the early 1970s inventions of genetic engineering techniques, biology entered the Genome Era. As the new century dawned, the Genome Era was passing its baton to the Age of Proteomics, promising an upheaval in pharmaceutics and medicine that proponents argued would be every bit as dramatic as had been Pasteur’s and Koch’s discovery of microbes, Fleming’s finding penicillin, and Salk’s and Sabin’s polio vaccines.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

One might guess, perhaps, that combustion transformed vital air into fixed air and fuel to ash, and that the ability of this transformation to continue was limited by the amount of vital air available. Lavoisier’s proposal directly contradicted the then-current phlogiston theory. That alone would have been shocking enough, but it also turned out . . . To appreciate what comes next, you must put yourself into an eighteenth-century frame of mind. Forget the discovery of DNA, which occurred only in 1953. Unlearn the cell theory of biology, which was formulated in 1839. Imagine looking at your hand, flexing your fingers . . . and having absolutely no idea how it worked. The anatomy of muscle and bone was known, but no one had any notion of “what makes it go”—why a muscle moves and flexes, while clay molded into a similar shape just sits there.

Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

Most of the Peninsula’s population can be clearly distinguished from the Mongoloid, Indoid, and Negroid races, but not from other groups predominating in the Near East and North Africa. Some of the most promising advances in the field of prehistory are now being made through modern genetic research. The refinement of serology, the discovery of DNA (1953), and the subsequent operation of mapping the 3,000 million ‘letters’ on human genes permit investigations of a very sophisticated nature. The correlation of genetic and linguistic records now suggests that the patterns of biological and cultural evolution may be closer than imagined. Recent studies show that the movement of genetic material into prehistoric Europe corresponded with parallel cultural trends.