Jack Szostak, who admitted to not being a visual thinker or expert in structural biology.
Doudna’s mission when she arrived at the University of Colorado as a postdoc was to map the intron that Cech had discovered could be a self-splicing piece of RNA, showing all of its atoms, bonds, and shapes.
That is a challenging concept. We can visualize a curved line or surface, but it is hard to imagine what curved three-dimensional space would be like, much less a curved four dimensions. But for mathematicians, extending the concept of curvature into different dimensions is easy, or at least doable. This involves using the concept of the metric, which specifies how to calculate the distance between two points in space.
The Jew who abandons his faith,” he once said, “is in a similar position to a snail that abandons his shell. He is still a snail.”68.
I don’t think that I would be me if I didn’t have sickle cell.
Electrical fluid is attracted by points. We do not know whether this property is in lightning. But since they agree in all particulars wherein we can already compare them, is it not probable they agree likewise in this?” To which he added a momentous rallying cry: “Let the experiment be made.
Evolution has been working toward optimizing the human genome for 3.85 billion years,” says NIH director Francis Collins, who is not an atheist. “Do we really think that some small group of human genome tinkerers could do better without all sorts of unintended consequences?
Einstein’s goal as he pursued his general theory of relativity was to find the mathematical equations describing two complementary processes: 1. How a gravitational field acts on matter, telling it how to move. 2. And in turn, how matter generates gravitational fields in spacetime, telling it how to curve. His head-snapping insight was that gravity could be defined as the curvature of spacetime, and thus it could be represented by a metric tensor. For more than three years he.
For centuries, the devastating scourge of lightning had generally been considered a supernatural phenomenon or expression of God’s will. At the approach of a storm, church bells were rung to ward off the bolts. “The tones of the consecrated metal repel the demon and avert storm and lightning,” declared St. Thomas Aquinas.
It was as if something in the animal’s body and in its brain had been engineered to work together instantly rather than being learned.
One moral issue that continues to loom large for her is inequality, especially if the wealthy are able to buy genetic enhancements for their children. “We could create a gene gap that would get wider with each new generation,” she says. “If you think we face inequalities now, imagine what it would be like if society became genetically tiered along economic lines and we transcribed our financial inequality into our genetic code.
One evening at a dinner, Murray’s wife asked him why he remained so cheerful given the depravity of the world. “We must remember that this is a very small star,” he responded, “and probably some of the larger and more important stars may be very virtuous and happy.
Talmud brought him science books, including a popular illustrated series called People’s Books on Natural Science, “a work which I read with breathless attention,” said Einstein.
We now have the power to control our genetic future, which is awesome and terrifying.
What made the single-guide system particularly significant – from both a scientific and an intellectual property standpoint – was that it was an actual human-made invention, not merely a discovery of a natural phenomenon.
A person “at rest” on the equator is actually spinning with the earth’s rotation at 1,040 miles per hour and orbiting with the earth around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour.
He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and communities,” he reflected. “I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude.”32.
Jobs’s pep talk could have been.
You ought to kill Newton,” he told Amelio one day by phone.