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  • I Had No Idea

    By Oronte January 31, 2008 12:54 pm

    This week’s Economist brings news that Dr. Craig Venter has made the penultimate step toward “what people are hoping to see: the world’s first artificial organism.” He and his team have “replicated the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium,” which “lives in the urinary tract and is thought to cause urethritis.” (They “edited” one of its genes, so it can’t “stick to mammalian cells, [and] thus forestalled the risk of creating anything nasty.”)

    Dr. Venter, they report, “wants to understand how life works” by finding the basics necessary for an organism to survive and reproduce, which might tell us more about “the last universal common ancestor of life on Earth.” But Venter “is also a practical man,” they point out, and through his business Synthetic Genomics hopes to “create a parts list of biological components…that could be ordered from catalogues in the way that electronic components can be.”

    If he manages this, they write, “he will not only have made a great technological leap forward, but he will also have erased one of the last mythic distinctions in science—that between living and nonliving matter.” Indeed.

    I don’t want to ask at the moment if ethics courses are mandatory in science curricula at your universities, and I’m not prepared to discuss my own belief that just because one can do something doesn’t mean one should do it.

    I’m wondering instead if our friends in the scientific community can tell me if my lay-inkling is correct, that never in history has there been a greater gap between the capabilities of science to create new technologies and the public’s understanding of that science.

    That is, we still fought our wars largely on horseback about the time Einstein wrote the introduction to his Special Theory of Relativity. But many of the improvements we made in killing each other at the turn of that last century were mechanical in nature, variations and improvements on older technologies, such as the armored tank, the machine gun, and barbed wire. It took until the Second War to get radar, the aqua-lung, and nylon stockings. Then, of course, came The Bomb, a quantum leap.

    My inkling is that there’s stuff happening in labs and cubbies that the general public not only can’t imagine coming, and soon, but which they couldn’t begin to understand due to the level of science involved.

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Comments on I Had No Idea

  • If you build it, yeah, they'll probably come.
  • Posted by D. Bowring on January 31, 2008 at 6:00pm EST

  • First of all, what a consistently fantastic blog.

    I'm an Engineering Physics grad student with three years of pre-med teaching assistantship under my belt. It's my experience that even the most physics/math-phobic, overworked, underslept student can understand very complicated, foreign ideas if they put in the effort. Maybe a corollary to your question is: How much effort do laypeople need to put into understanding these sorts of new, insane developments?

    Left to their own devices, television and newspapers are generally pretty terrible at science reporting. Major discoveries are usually either shoehorned into two paragraphs or framed in terms of controversy to provoke people, in which case the article is then about the controversy and not the science.

    What if we carved out ten percent of the airtime or newspaper real estate currently allocated for blind, wild '08 campaign speculation and spent those resources on a frank discussion of the science behind "artificial life"? Or the necessity of building a new particle accelerator (http://www.linearcollider.org/cms/)? It's admittedly hard work to explain cutting-edge genetic research, but it's entirely possible. The question is whether the general public can hear us when we try.

    Of course, I'm pretty biased. I'd love to hear the opinion of some non-scientists.

  • 10 Percent
  • Posted by Oronte on February 1, 2008 at 9:15am EST

  • Good idea, great idea. But it would have to be legislated in order to get done, and who would stand for the content of our media to be legislated? And that's my fear in general: Without an authority figure telling us to pay attention and discuss our futures, we'll let what people can do, especially if it's profitable, dictate our futures.

  • supercool linear collider
  • Posted by Pat on February 1, 2008 at 2:20pm EST

  • I agree with both of you, and would also like to add my heartfelt excitement at both your weather in Inner station Oronte, and linear colliders in general. I live near Philadelphia and despite the storms dumping tons of skiable fresh powder all over the country and the middle east, we have yet to see any kind of substantial snowfall. I know someone who works as a crystallographer with GSK, and every few months they have to fly to Chicago to use their particle collider to conduct experiements that lead to the development of new drugs for the pharmaceutical industry. This is what the public needs to know about; the vital connection between multi-billion dollar facilities and the lifesaving drugs that come out of them.

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