Sublime

il y a trois ans ; nous partagions le même bureau. Une fois, nous avions parlé civilisation. Il disait – et en un sens il le croyait vraiment que l'augmentation du flux d'informations à l'intérieur de la société était en soi une bonne chose. Que la liberté n'était rien d'autre que la possibilité d'établir des interconnexions variées entre individus

Any decision-making process, anything that, however imperfectly, tries to manipulate the world in order to achieve some goal, whether that’s a bacterium seeking higher glucose concentrations, genes trying to pass copies of themselves through generations, or governments trying to achieve economic growth: if it’s doing a good job, it’s being Bayesian

Tatum pelted colonies of E. coli with enough X-rays to kill 9,999 of every 10,000 bacteria. Among the few survivors he discovered mutants that could grow only if he supplied them with a particular amino acid. Helped along, the mutants could even reproduce, and their offspring were just as crippled. Tatum had gotten the same results as he had with b

They grew from his early preoccupation with how bacteria keep their inside different from the outside.

So, to solve the origin-of-life conundrum, scientists needed somehow to find a molecule that could play both roles—

: je ne serai pas seulement un chercheur engagé pour le progrès des connaissances et l’amélioration de la santé, mais parfois isolé du monde dans sa tour d’ivoire. Ce qui compte c’est aussi ce qui se passe ici et maintenant, en tout cas la manière dont on prépare le monde de demain. Après avoir passé douze années à étudier comment les bactéries coo

some form of complexity theory is required if we are to understand many of the intimate, and patently uncertain, interactions found in modern society.

ribozyme, a ribonucleic acid with enzymatic activity.

One of them was an enzyme, appropriately anointed Dicer,