Kudos to the synthetic biology community and MIT’s public relations department for getting the iGEM competition on the Lehrer News Hour. You can listen to the podcast here.
I was happy to hear that amidst all the enthusiasm, some rational voices were also given air time. One of them was Roger Brent, director of the Molecular [...]

Going through old files the other day, I came across a MacArthur Foundation Occasional Paper that had a profound effect on my thinking about interdisciplinary research and collaboration.
Now 15 years old, An Experiment in Scientific Organization by Robert L. Kahn, is finally available online. It details the history and practices of the MacArthur Foundation’s long-running [...]

I’m racing off to Stanford University for a conference honoring the 40th anniversary of Douglas Engelbart’s ‘Mother of All Demos.”
Called Program for the Future, the conference aims to explore ways to “enhance our capacity for problem solving, decision making knowledge organization and planning in every field of human endeavor.”
When I interviewed Engelbart on The Site [...]

A few posts ago, I made a plea for the Obama administration to include social scientists in the mix as it moves to return science to its rightful position of inclusion and respect in the public policy sphere. If you want just one real-life example of what’s at stake by not doing so, read this [...]

Maybe my imagination is getting the best of me, but I laughed out loud when I read last Thursday’s New York Times article about the minimal impact of a big hypertension study published in 2000 that compared various blood pressure drugs.
The study was called the Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial, or [...]

Earlier this week, I got a phone call from Steve Aldrich and Jim Newcomb, respectively CEO and director of research for Bio Economic Research Associates, a private research and advisory firm.
They’d read my paper on risk and synthetic biology and thought my characterization of their report on synthetic biology, “Genome Synthesis and Design Futures: Implications [...]

I don’t know what kind of planetary alignment took place over the past week with regards to synthetic biology, but whatever it was, I like it.
Over the course of five days in November, from Thursday the 13th to Monday the 17th, four conversations about synthetic biology took place. They involved everyone from non-profit leaders to [...]

My next column in Strategy+Business (coming out in Winter 2009) will be about the need to rewrite our innovation policies from scratch. I strongly believe that we need to move beyond simplistic “greasing of the wheels” for corporations via tax credits and patent reform, and look more closely at how to create a whole new [...]

I recently a story about software patents so goofy (to me, anyhow — YMMV) that I had to share it.The story was from the IT Examiner, titled, “US throws out most software patents.”
The hook was a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington DC. Instead of automatically granting a [...]

I’m a little embarrassed that it’s taken me almost two years to post this item — I saved a draft of it in January 2007, yikes — but even though I can’t find the link to the original story (The Korea Times, 21 Jan 2007), I thought it was worth posting anyway. It’s great food [...]