“If biological engineering were aviation, it would be at the birdman stage: some observation and some understanding, but largely naive mimicry. For the field to really take flight, it needs the machinery of synthetic biology.”
“As president, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything.”
— Barack Obama
“Adding decimal points to our irrationality doesn’t change much.”
“(I love the Niels Bohr quote: “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”)”
“And there’s also the matter of cells sucking. Trying to engineer living things is like working with a computer that does what it is told half the time and half the time runs the programs it wants to run.”
“The nice thing about being an artist is that I can jump around from one area of interest to the next—microbiology one week and the gravitational pull of the Moon the next,” he says. “Scientists don’t seem to be allowed to do that anymore—they have to specialize in their own little field—which is a shame, I think.”
“As scientists understand very well (and as Watson has written in his own defense), personality has always been an inseparable part of their styles of inquiry and a potent, if unacknowledged, factor in their results. Indeed, no art or popular entertainment is built as is science upon the individual talents, preferences, and habits of its leaders.”
“It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach.”
“Dr. Endy answered the question of what synthetic biology is, and whether scientists are actually creating life with it.
Drew Endy: If you go into the dictionary and you just think about what those two words mean – construction or creation – creation implies that you’re a God. You have unlimited power. You have an ability to manipulate the universe and matter that’s unlimited. You don’t have a budget. You’re infinitely powerful. You have a perfect understanding. You’re all-knowing. That’s not who I am. That’s not who we are as people, as human beings. We have a budget, we have a very crude understanding of how the universe works, we have a limited ability to change and manipulate materials.”
Drew Endy: If you go into the dictionary and you just think about what those two words mean – construction or creation – creation implies that you’re a God. You have unlimited power. You have an ability to manipulate the universe and matter that’s unlimited. You don’t have a budget. You’re infinitely powerful. You have a perfect understanding. You’re all-knowing. That’s not who I am. That’s not who we are as people, as human beings. We have a budget, we have a very crude understanding of how the universe works, we have a limited ability to change and manipulate materials.”
“Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren’t more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.”
“After all, the resulting life forms now being discussed will still rely on a biological “chassis,” the “hollowed out” cell. As the Harvard researcher points out, “That shell is not such an empty husk — if that’s all it was, it wouldn’t work. If the empty husk is like a computer and has the basics of microprocessor and so forth … the unique thing about biology is that not only does it read the program, it also modifies the program, turning genes on and off.”
“I strongly believe that it is the destiny of Nature to develop consciousness and eventually develop the awareness to understand itself and responsibly shape its own future through an intelligent design rather than by billion year chance-by-chance often kludgey mutations. If we for a minute accept that premise, then learning about BIO is not just fun, but the destiny of Humans and the destiny of Nature itself. We are fulfilling the final step of the evolutionary process. Nature will eventually develop the awareness to chart its own course rather than being steered by the seas of chance.”
— This quote is part of the welcome to a cool blog about learning biology, DIY BIO 4 Beginners. I think that this idea is very interesting as a premise for wanting to study biology, and I think it brings up a lot of important and unanswered (unanswerable?) questions. What is the goal of studying biology? Can we be “Nature” and control it? What is the role of randomness in shaping living processes? What will an intelligently designed human look like, and how does this image of the ideal change depending on each individual, historical moment, or culture’s point of view?
“It will be a long, long time” before synthetic biology produces bugs more deadly than ones already out there. “Nothing in the lab is better than nature.”
