“Tom Knight, often called the “father” of biohacking, tells a joke: “A biologist goes into the lab one day, does an experiment and finds something is twice as complicated as she thought it was. ‘Great,’ she says, ‘I get to write a paper.’ An engineer goes into another lab, does an experiment, and she too finds something twice as complicated as she was expecting. ‘Damn,’ she says, ‘Now how do I get rid of that?’”
“In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.”
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- Richard Feynman, Letter to the Editor of the California Tech, Feb. 27 1976
(via Adaptive Complexity)
“Whether we are conscious of it or not, much of the direction taken in labs isn’t based on pure science, but based on what the editors of a high impact journal will publish.”
“If you can read a popular-science publication (and enjoy it), then you most likely have enough brainpower to help us make massive scientific breakthroughs.”
“While he hopes that his work will lead to new and better medical treatments, much of the research remains a slog. While it is relatively easy to come up with new ideas for genetic circuitry, they often don’t work the way researchers would like. “Biology is messy and noisy,” says Dr. Collins, a professor of biomedical engineering. “That makes it quite challenging to engineer circuits with desired behaviors.”
“As for the language of communication, the participants commented that, due to the severe problem of public understanding of science, phrases like “genetic engineering” and “synthetic biology” trigger fear and superstition. Stanford engineer Drew Endy joked that it might be more readily accepted if renamed “shiny happy biology”, but it would be better served, he said, by a clear explanation of the science that is accessible to policy makers and the public.”
