“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”
I do wish we were going to be around for the Singularity — it’s possible if Ray’s 2029 schedule proves valid. Meanwhile, it is certainly fun to consider the ramifications of exponentially accelerating change. The Kurzweil theory is becoming a bit mainstream — appearing in New York Times columnist John Tierney’s column.
More important: the May IEEE Spectrum is a special issue devoted to Singularity topics. This is a rather remarkable issue of Spectrum - the lineup of authors promises lots of brainfood - from Rodney Brooks to Vernor Vinge.
Meanwhile Nanosolar seems to be accelerating towards Kurzweil’s enticing forecasts of competitive solar power via nanotechnology. Yeh, it’s a challenge to separate the hype from the real progress. Dear readers: want to post your photos of the volume of real product coming out of Nanosolar’s US and German plants? Count boxes loading onto airfreight trucks?
Technorati Tags: Kurzweil
Tracking corn from seed to ethanol, it creates greenhouse gas emissions on par with diesel and only slightly less than gasoline. But harvesting native prairie grasses for ethanol leads to a net reduction in the planet-warming pollutants.
Click on the chart at left for the full size view. This is an excellent graphic from the new study published in the February Conservation Biology, by Groom, Gray & Townsend from the University of Washington and The Nature Conservancy. It appears the authors have attempted a full life-cycle inputs/outputs study of most of the biofuels sources currently in production or under development.
Of the biofuel sources they evaluated, the only ones that make sense are those that don’t work today: switch grass, wood waste and algae. The “wood residue” crop would presumably include processes such as the Range Fuels thermochemical process. I’m keeping an eye on Range Fuels because their syngas process is close to conventional chemical plant methods and doesn’t require any bio-engineering breakthroughs [as does the switch grass channel].
There is a summary of this report in the Seattle PI.
Technorati Tags: Biodiesel, Biofools, Biofuel
Long and short: Yesterday personal genomics was an oddity. Today, it’s an industry.
Today marks another entrant in the personal genomics game: Navigenics, the much anticipated startup out of Redwood Shores, Ca, is open for business.
The company arrives as direct competition to 23andMe and DeCodeMe, both of which began offering direct-to-consumer genotyping last year. Navigenics was originally planning to launch around the same time as the competition, but ended up taking several months longer to fine-tune it’s product. As planned, Navigenics is taking a more clinical approach to personal genomics, with a more overt pitch towards the medical implications.
I had the opportunity to visit the company last week and get a preview of the service. Here are a few standout observations.
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Heading upcountry in Africa to visit small farms is absolutely exhilarating given the dramatic beauty of big skies, red soil, and arid vistas, but eventually the two-lane tarmac narrows to rutted dirt, and the journey must continue on foot. The farmers you eventually meet are mostly women, hardworking but visibly poor. They have no improved seeds, no chemical fertilizers, no irrigation, and with their meager crops they earn less than a dollar a day. Many are malnourished.
Nearly two-thirds of Africans are employed in agriculture, yet on a per-capita basis they produce roughly 20 percent less than they did in 1970. Although modern agricultural science was the key to reducing rural poverty in Asia, modern farm science—including biotechnology—has recently been kept out of Africa.
In Starved for Science Robert Paarlberg explains why poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies, particularly genetically engineered seeds with improved resistance to insects and drought. He traces this obstacle to the current opposition to farm science in prosperous countries. Having embraced agricultural science to become well-fed themselves, those in wealthy countries are now instructing Africans—on the most dubious grounds—not to do the same.
In a book sure to generate intense debate, Paarlberg details how this cultural turn against agricultural science among affluent societies is now being exported, inappropriately, to Africa. Those who are opposed to the use of agricultural technologies are telling African farmers that, in effect, it would be just as well for them to remain poor.
Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the recommendation.
Don’t miss this interview with Bill Ericson — who looks after the biotech opportunities at Mohr Davidow Ventures. An excerpt:
…One area we considered greatly underinvested was sequencing. Other nucleic-acid measurement techniques are surrogates for sequence information, which we thought was the gold standard. At the end of the day, if you could do fast, accurate sequencing, you’d probably end up dominating the field.
One technology that got us really excited was at a company then called Nanofluidics [now PacBio], where three Cornell postdocs were working on zero-mode waveguides and using them to do sequencing. We convinced them to move their group to the Palo Alto area, where they incubated with us for the better part of a year. We wanted to invest in people and technology that could really take you to the next, next level of sequencing — as close as possible to the end state of sequencing technology. These guys had at least the theoretical ability to do the full human genome for $1,000 or less.
VBLS: What consequences do you expect from the advent of such high-speed sequencing?
BE: This is an information-generating technology, one that’s faster, cheaper and more powerful than anything else. Any number of new applications could flow from that. For instance, everyone believes that genetics plays a role in predisposing you to various diseases. If we do the population studies [that reliably link genetic differences to disease], you can arm physicians, patients and consumers with a better way of looking at health. Human health turns into much more of an information system that can be understood and proactively addressed, in sharp contrast to medical practice today, which is tremendously reactive and wasteful.
Once you shine the spotlight of sequencing on large populations, you’ll identify patterns that are invisible today. I would love to see genetic studies show that only five percent of the population actually needs to go on a drug that today is prescribed for 40 percent to 50 percent. That’s a tremendous win — no drug has no side effects. Sequencing could also be very useful in an area that frankly ought to scare all of us to death, which is the emergence of drug-resistant infectious disease. You could see the mutations [that confer resistance] happening in real time. In real time, you could be measuring somatic mutations [that give rise to cancer].
I think all these tools are going to give rise to new applications. It’s a lot like watching the computer industry — once PCs were adopted to the point of being cheap and readily available, people created applications for them. I honestly wish I could tell you precisely what will be valuable and what won’t, but we’re still in the early innings.
“What happens first, and what’s responsible for what? Is the damage to the nerve cells first, and then the plaque, or vice versa?”
The direction of the causal arrow is still uncertain — is the plaque a cause or a symptom? Either way, this result looks like it could be important, as it implies the changes can happen overnight.
An innovative imaging technique has revealed that the plaques that develop throughout the brains of Alzheimer’s patients can form overnight, and they are likely a cause rather than a symptom of the disease.
Plaques, a defining hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, are brain lesions that result from the abnormal accumulation of a protein called amyloid-beta. Since the symptoms of the disease progress over the course of decades, plaques were generally thought to appear and accumulate slowly…
Don’t miss the lecture given by Oxford ethicist Julian Savulescu at the Sydney Ideas series at the University of Sydney. Available as a 49 minute podcast from ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing. While Savulescu makes compelling arguments for a wide range of interventions, the presentation is also a survey of what is possible now — or likely in the not too distant future.
Professor Julian Savulescu is an eminent ethicist from Oxford University. He believes we should proceed with research into enhancing not only the genetics of fighting disease, but the genetics and pharmacology of improving IQ, behaviour, mood, character and morality. He argues there are immense benefits, not only for individuals, but for society as a whole. Only by knowing, can we prevent the abuses of knowledge. A lecture from the Sydney Ideas series at the University of Sydney. (Originally broadcast on 19th August 2007)
Highly recommended.
This Peter Huber article is a bit dated [from April 10, 2007] but the content is just as worthy of consideration today:
Bad policies deliver their disasters when overtaken by events. A peace-in-our-time narcotic stupefied democracies for years while Hitler seized power and built Panzers. We are now four decades into another self-induced daze that will end in another great spasm of death.
When Jonas Salk announced his polio vaccine in 1955, humanity’s century-long war against germs seemed all but over. Public sanitation had driven them out of the water supply. Vaccines and antibiotics had then chased them out of the lungs, fluids and intestines of the public itself. “The time has come to close the book on infectious disease,” our surgeon general would announce in 1967. “We have basically wiped out infection in the United States.”
Viewed in that context, the FDA amendments that President Kennedy signed into law in 1962, to regulate drugs in the peaceful, germ-free future, seemed to make good scientific sense. Cholera had indeed given way to cigarettes and cholesterol. The diseases of the future would be choreographed by lifestyle and genes, not germs. The drugs of the future would target cancer, arthritis and other problems rooted in human chemistry. The new killers would creep up rather predictably and evenly, on adults, not children. Widely prescribed, pill-a-day treatments might easily cause more harm than good. Just months earlier, a horrified world had discovered that one drug of the future — thalidomide — relieved morning sickness and helped people fall asleep; but it also halted the growth of a baby’s limbs in the womb.
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Technorati Tags: FDA
Jeff Jarvis gets a free DNA test:
23andMe, the DNA company, offered free tests to 1,000 of the Davosati, unlocking our DNA for each of us, telling us about certain genetic propensities, identifying our heritage, and opening up a new social network of the gene.
We went to a booth in the fancy party hotel and spit — and spit and spit and spit some more — into a plastic tube and created a web account. Investor Esther Dyson even brought a few kits with her to the fancy final-night dinner party and had moguls salivating. In a few weeks, I’ll have my report back. This one is on the house for Davos participants. Otherwise, it costs $1,000.
Jeff Jarvis has been blogging the DLD conference.
Dawkins says that the gene “is pure information.” Venter proved this by taking a gene out of one organism and put it in another and causes the second to change into the first — your cat becomes your dog, as moderator John Brockman explains. So Dawkins says this demonstrates clearly that a gene is information that can be put not just in an organism but on a disk. So Venter explains that we are at the start of “the design phase” of biology. “I’m looking at genes at the design components of the future.” His example is “biological machines” that could take carbon out of the environment and create fuel. “We can make anything in the lab that comes out of the ground in terms of carbon.”
Venter says he’s concerned that because the price of oil is in the hands of a few people, they can artificially lower the price to take away incentives for scientific development of alternatives. This is why he favors carbon taxes.
He says that evolution is already open-source; it happens all around and in us. The microorganisms living in each of our lungs are different as they adapt to our immune system. He says that we need to take more of a hand in that evolution.
On evolution, Venter also says that genes do travel back and forth among species via viruses. So the ladder view of sequential, serial evolution is thrown out. It’s more of a stew. Dawkins also complained about the “schoolboy howler” view of evolution as species replacing each other; it’s also not that serial and extinction is a separate process.
Dawkins says that he is, of course, not disturbed by fears of scientists playing god (there being none). But he says we should fear — this is my phrase — scientists playing devil if they do destructive things. He warns that the accusation of them playing God is a case of crying wolf, deafening us to the works of devils vs. gods.
Venter says this “certainly changes the definition of an internet virus” since the code for a virus can be spread around the internet and built.
A fascinating next question is consciousness and its form. Is it data that also can be captured? A questioner asks where the soul resides. Dawkins says he does not believe there is a soul and says the brain activity we have defined as the soul dies when the body dies. But I’m courious whether, given a hard drive, the information that is brain activity and conscousiness can similarly be extracted and transferred and altered.
I’m fascinated with the idea that information becomes the building block of anything including life. Data are alive. Life is media.
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