Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, created viruses with radioactive tracers in their DNA. They allowed the viruses to infect E. coli and then pulled off their empty husks in a fast-spinning centrifuge.
Carl Zimmer • Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life
Two prominent philosophers proved to be especially influential members. The first was Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who is the contemporary successor to John Rawls in defining the concept of justice. At the time, he was writing an essay titled “The Case Against Perfection: What’s Wrong with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic
... See moreWalter Isaacson • The Code Breaker
The title of the gathering was “Engineering the Human Germline,” and it focused on the ethics of making genetic edits that would be inherited. These “germline” edits were fundamentally different, medically and morally, from somatic-cell edits that affect only certain cells in an individual patient. The germline was a red line that scientists had
... See moreWalter Isaacson • The Code Breaker
By altering the ingredients of the idea menu they are exposed to, we might, in turn, minimize the dangerous inputs to the processes of belief and network updating.
Jessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)
DNA SCISSORS: THE CRISPR REVOLUTION
