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I’m sympathetic to Horgan’s claim that there’s something rotten in the state of science, I can get on board with the idea that our scientific luminaries are a bunch of asses and buffoons, and I’m even open to the possibility that large swaths of supposed scientific activity have basically become interpretative dance.

Adam Mastroianni • Science Will Only End Once We've Licked All the Objects in the Universe

Michael's Notebook

michaelnotebook.com

An Institution for the Amateur Biologist (diybio.org).

Ed Regis • Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

an ability to amplify human abilities.

David Rose • Enchanted Objects: Innovation, Design, and the Future of Technology

she had just discovered two new yeast genes that, when inactivated, caused the yeast to have ever shorter telomeres. She named the genes Est accordingly.

Thomas R. Cech • The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets

The view of proponents like Dr. Fauci carried the day. In December 2017, the NIH dropped its restrictions, enabling Baric and others to move forward with gain-of-function research if they chose.22 Of course, the Wuhan lab had never been subject to American rules. And documents released in September 2021 appeared to show that it had continued to wor

Alex Berenson • Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

While scientific progress, then, proceeds by curiously exploring adjacent possibilities, preference is given to work closely tied to existing science and conducted by a privileged subset of scientists.

Perry Zurn, Dani S. Bassett • Curiosity and Networks of Possibility

In a world of synthetic gene drives, the border between the human and the natural, between the laboratory and the wild, already deeply blurred, all but dissolves. In such a world, not only do people determine the conditions under which evolution is taking place, people can—again, in principle—determine the outcome.