Freeman Dyson on Do-It-Yourself Biotech and Extraterrestrial Life

Physicist Freeman Dyson gave a TED talk where he suggests that in the future there will be do-it-yourself biotechnology kits for the home geneticist, and that this is a necessary for the future acceptance of biotech by the general population.

“We should follow the model that has been so successful with the electronic industry.” Dyson said. “What really turned computers into a great success in the world as a whole was toys. As soon as computers became toys, when the kids could come home and play with them, then the industry took off. That has to happen with biotech.”

He does acknowledge that he doesn't really know that much about biotechnology, and so it's understandable that he misses an important point: biotech "toys" involve the manipulation of living and (often) breathing life forms. Accidentally creating an genetically engineered dog that is in constant pain is fundamentally different than mis-soldering a capacitor to a motherboard. And the release of genetically engineered animals, plants and microbes has the potential to cause significant environmental damage. Messing with biology just isn't the same as toying with electronics.

The rest of Dyson's talk mostly focuses about the search for extraterrestrial life on Europa by shining a bright light on the surface, which is kind of a nifty if unlikely to be successful idea. "Look for what is detectable, not for what is probable" is his philosophy.

Gareth Owens: A New Note for Nat

"Being a hypersonic rock star is great... until you get too old."

Concatenation has posted a new short "Futures" story by linguist Gareth Owens: "A New Note for Nat" (pdf), which was originally published in the 30 August 2007 issue of the journal Nature. The story is the tale of a washed-up hypersonic rock star.

The secret to hypersonic rock is that human hearing deteriorates with age, with the loss of ability to hear the highest frequency sounds - about 16 kHz or higher - by age 18. That means there are a range of tones that only teenagers can hear. Perfect for music you don't want to share with your parents or other oldsters. And it's not completely science fiction; a song with a both "normal" and hypersonic tracks was released in 2006 (click the "Listen" button on the upper right side of the page to hear a clip).

And if you are in the under-18 audience for "hypersonic rock", you might be interested in the "Teen Buzz" Mosquito ringtone. I'm way too old for it to be useful on my cell phone . . .

Biology in the Top 10 Science Fiction Stories by Women

In 2003 Gwyneth Jones wrote a column for the Guardian listing her top 10 science fiction picks by women writers. Many of her choices have strong biology themes:

• Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness takes place on the planet Gethen, where the inhabitants are androgynes who can become either male or female during their fertile period.

• In Kate Wilhelm's Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang: A Novel cloning is developed to save the human race after the environment has been destroyed.

• CJ Cherryh's Cyteen is "about domination and slavery, the monsters power makes and the twisted lives of the children born to perpetuate the dynasties" with genetic engineering and cloning central to the story.

• Kathleen Ann Goonan's Light Music is "a tour of the consequences of Lynn Margulis's radical thinking on evolution. This is how we could see ourselves if we weren't Darwin's slaves: every self a community, every human being a symbiote city, a node in the richly permeable network of life on Earth."


Read Jones' entire list.