Kids at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 2009 LBL Daughters & Sons to Work Day (flickr/berkeleylab)

Perhaps I’ll follow through in the future on collaborating with some science educators to design a hybrid course on the history of science for middle or high schoolers. But that’s a post for another time.

This creative project might seem a little self-serving, but it allows me to revisit some work that I’m proud of, and which made me a better writer and editor, which in turn made me a better and more committed English teacher. Moreover, it allows me to explore and reinforce connections between what I used to spend my time on, what I’ve been reading, and what I do now. And in the recent words of Steven Johnson, speaking about where good ideas come from, “Chance favors the connected mind” (emphasis added).

Without further ado, then, here’s a list of some Science Progress Greatest Hits authored, in whole, or in part, by your humble editor, arranged in chronological order (cross-posted under Portfolio):

04-15-10 | The Weathermen Know Which Way the Wind Blows
A recent survey demonstrates that many forecasters embrace their role as informal science educators. Ed Maibach says it’s an opportunity to boost public understanding of global warming.

03-30-10 | Court Rules that DNA Is Information, Not Intellectual Property
A lawsuit argued that patents owned by Myriad Genetics on two genes connected to breast and ovarian cancer stunt genetic research and limit access to health care for women. The ruling said that genes can’t be patented.

03-23-10 | Energy for Regional Innovation
We can ensure that scientists, engineers, and taxpayers alike get the most out of federal support for basic research and development by taking what researchers know about moving ideas from the lab to the market and linking universities, business, and the government in an effort to grow regional economies.

03-05-10 | How Science Sparked Democracy
There are intimate connections between the scientific advances that expanded the frontiers of human knowledge and the democratic experiments that expanded the frontiers of human liberty.

02-02-10 | A First-Place Budget for Science
The budget request for fiscal year 2011 that the Obama administration released on Monday includes foundational investments that will help the United States remain the leader among innovative nations.

12-04-09 | Reason is a Casualty in the Ongoing War on Climate Science
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial section, Daniel Henninger took exaggeration of the scandal over emails stolen from scientists at the University of East Anglia to new heights, arguing that the incident undermines the entire centuries-old scientific enterprise. But the column ignores both the current observable impact of climate change and scientific history, and is merely the latest volley in the ongoing conservative war on science.

11-10-09 | Time for Family, Time for Science
A significant proportion of American women leave scientific careers between earning their Ph.D. and winning tenure-track positions. Many of these “leaks” in the pipeline are the result of decisions to start families. Changes to federal and university policy can stem the losses, say the authors of a new report.

10-21-09 | Tools for Truth Telling
Given the Obama administration’s positive approach to science and to human rights, a new CAP report argues that now is the time to craft policies that support collaborations between researchers and advocates that stop atrocities.

09-24-09 | The Coolest Platform Raises the Hardest Questions
So who is speaking here, an ethicist, a scientist, or a policymaker? Real talk on the ethics of synthetic biology.

06-23-09 | NIH Funding is Good for Your Health, and It’s Good for the Economy
Federal funding for biomedical research saves lives. Not only that, but investment in research through the National Institutes of Health stimulates the economy by helping people stay healthy and productive. So says a new report published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access).

06-23-09 | Personal Profiling
Will access to our own genetic information make us healthier? That’s the idea, but there’s a lot to learn as we share and interpret it. Meanwhile, questions remain about proper oversight of an industry that blurs the line between consumer and research participant.

06-16-09 | The Worn Grooves of Disciplinary Research
Is pathbreaking science the product of interdisciplinary groups or the interdisciplinary thinking of foresighted individuals? In a commentary in PLoS Computational Biology, Sean Eddy, a Howard Hughes investigator, argues that “roadmap” thinking from the National Institutes of Health for building teams of specialists to tackle complex problems in modern research is flawed, because it encourages work in the worn grooves of existing, and perhaps outmoded, disciplines.

03-27-09 | Bush’s Council on Bioethics Makes Toothless Attack on New Stem Cell Policy<
Yesterday, the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, released a statement authored by members of the President’s Council on Bioethics critiquing the Obama administration’s stem cell policy. What the authors failed to explain in either the statement or the accompanying press release is that the current members of the President’s Council on Bioethics were appointed by George W. Bush, and will serve until the charter for the council expires in September. The critique, in effect, is an echo from the past.

Coda

The eponymous title of this post is drawn from the title of one of my favorite SP articles (“The Areas of Our Expertise”)—favorite because it’s a great bioethics/policy/history of science think-piece, and because I took a speech written for a talk at the Library of Alexandria and edited it into a real article. The author, Eric Meslin, is also a great guy (and incidentally the former Executive Director of President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Council). Plus how often do you get to write about ideas with names like “Non-Overlapping Magisteria”?

A bench scientist or an engineer will tell you the same thing: the distinction between “science” and “technology” is important. Science is more about the undirected search for answers to questions about how the natural world works. Technology is more about the directed application of tools, methods, or even scientific processes to expand human capabilities. The two inevitably overlap, but if science is about figuring out how things work, then technology is simply making them work. But in James Gleick’s latest book, he masterfully describes the historical and theoretical foundations of the field that knits science and technology together, or perhaps encompasses them both: information theory.

He draws an arc from the earliest forms of human communication that aimed to compress time and distance–writing, counting, African drumming–all the way to late-20th-century quantum mechanics. But this connection is not a starry-eyed tendril that college students might invent around a dining hall table. The story he plows through Charles Babbage’s mechanical calculating machine; 19th-century telegraph economics; Claude Shannon’s seminal 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”; and the thicket of contemporary genetic computation is thrilling, riveting, and breathtaking.

The best episodes of the idiosyncratic BBC show, “Connections,” follow science historian James Burke as he cannonballs from one cultural innovation to another. Just a sampling from one Wikipedia show summary: “The search for artificial quinine to treat malaria led to the development of artificial dyes, which Germany used to produce fertilizers to grow wheat and led to the advancement of chemistry which in turn led to DuPont’s discovery of polymers such as nylon.” In a similar manner, though with more technical depth, Gleick weaves together Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene with Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

For a concrete example of how powerful these connections are, consider his explanation of how the uncertainty principle influences quantum teleportation–via information. In short, an atom can release two “entangled” quantum particles, for instance two photons with the same spin. These photos can fly off in opposite directions, indefinitely, and they will forever share the same spin–one way of looking at this is that they will carrying an identical bit of information, encoded in the spin. The uncertainty principle dictates that “when you measure any property of a quantum object, you thereby lose the ability to measure a complimentary property”–you can know the particle’s momentum, or its velocity, but you cannot know both. But the properties of entangled particles are fixed, thought they remain unknown until an observer measures them. So if two such particles are on opposite sides of the galaxy, and we measure the spin of one, we immediately know and fix permanently the spin of the other particle–a transfer of state that appears to happen faster than light. The paradox seems to violate the fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And indeed, nothing can, because what must actually travel from one particle’s location to the next to convey the other’s spin is information. And information cannot travel faster than light–so the spin is never “fixed” or “teleported” to the distant location until the information about it arrives.

Every once in a while, I am truly awed and amazed by the new intellectual soil cultivated by a writer. This sometimes happens in the areas of science writing, a field I have turned to often in the past few years. But The Information is truly remarkable in the depth and reach of the connections it conveys in exciting, imaginative prose. I could not recommend a non-fiction work more.

iGEM and David Appleyard (flickr.com/igemhq)

There’s lots to love and lots to chew on in this article by Jon Mooallem on synbio in the Sunday NYT mag. Mooallem captures science and spirit, covering the 2009 International Genetically Engineering Machine Competition by following an enthusiastic but under-resourced team of bioengineers at the City College of San Fransisco. That’s right: part-time students at a two-year community college compete with teams from the top research institutions on the planet.

Unfortunately, the CCSF folks can’t get their bacterial battery to work, but the enthusiasm on the razor’s edge of science is as contagious as some of the microbes they’re working with.

Three points. First, undergrads are building these biomachines, crafting new BioBricks of DNA that enable microorganisms to, for instances, change color in the presence of specific environmental toxins. And they are not conducting pure basic research; they are organizing information about to synthesize the basic functions of small life forms—for fun and competition. Drew Endy, the master builder and noted seer of the field, puts it like this:

We have now, in a bottom-up, grass-roots fashion, de facto installed a genetic-engineering curriculum for the future of our field in 120 schools worldwide.

Second, top-flight high schools can’t be that far down the ladder.

Third, the folks at CCSF prove that anyone can get into this, and as other journalists have noted, synbio is coming into the realm of computer programming, a high-powered hobby in which nerdy enthusiasts can do significant work in their own living rooms.