Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Biology on Mar 18th, 2008
I just finished reading Sean Carroll’s book The Making of the Fittest. Subtitled “DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution”, it’s the follow-on book to Endless Forms Most Beautiful. In this book Carroll devotes several chapters to demonstrating how, against our natural intuition, there really is enough time (given a few hundred million years) [...]
Posted in Biology on Feb 15th, 2008
Do you suppose, if your house was knocked over by Hurricane Fifi, that you might feel more slighted than if the same damage had been done by a storm with a more muscular name? Generals have long understood the value of giving their military operations intimidating names like Rolling Thunder and Urgent Fury. If you [...]
Posted in Biology on Jan 17th, 2008
Want to buy a slightly used genome?
Back in 2000, Craig Venter and Francis Collins (and Bill Clinton) announced the completion of “the” human genome. Not to take anything away from that achievement, but genomes are just as varied as humans. Whose genome was the human genome? Or to come at it from another direction: if [...]
Posted in Biology on Dec 4th, 2007
We live in some kind of golden age of microscopy. In the old days, people relied on stains that made cells look like this.
Useful, but not too pretty. It kills the cells too, but more to the point, no matter how useful it is, a picture like this is never going to land you on [...]
Posted in Biology on Nov 7th, 2007
I came across this Andy Grove interview in Newsweek in which he is complaining bitterly about the pharmaceutical industry. The piece begins with the statement that during the time that former CEO Grove spent at Intel, “the number of transistors on a chip went from about 1,000 to almost 10 billion.” And I thought to [...]
Posted in Biology on Oct 3rd, 2007
Among the last of a proud breed, this Castanea dentata, or American chestnut, stands alone in a Kentucky field. It is one of the very few mature flowering chestnuts that has so far eluded the fungal disease known as chestnut blight. What you see in the picture is a tree so valuable that it is [...]
Posted in Biology on Sep 7th, 2007
I gave a talk at the second O’Reilly Ignite Boston event tonight, and I was lucky enough to meet Hari Jayaram who was also there to present. Hari is a crystallographer at Brandeis with several Protein Data Bank entries under his belt, including the notorious coronavirus nucleocapsid of SARS fame. Along with several other friends, [...]
Posted in Biology on Aug 9th, 2007
When people hear about biofuels, they typically think of ethanol brewed from corn. That’s a reasonable association: this year the American corn crop is up nearly 20% from last year for this very reason. On the other hand, you might have also seen articles about the problems with the corn-to-ethanol process. Growing corn is, for [...]
Posted in Biology on Jul 27th, 2007
In the continuing series of strange animal vs. animal YouTube videos, here is one from the Seattle Aquarium. Poor little octopus. Sitting defenseless in a tank full of sharks. Poor little guy.
I suppose that if sharks made their own version of a movie like Jaws, it would be called Eight Legs. “Just when you thought [...]
Posted in Biology on Jul 24th, 2007
Freeman Dyson, the physicist, provocateur, and one-time colleague of Richard Feynman, has written a piece for the New York Review of Books called Our Biotech Future, and boy is it a doozy. This is no timid prediction about curing the common cold or even avoiding the next plague. It’s a full-on embrace of a bio-kaleidoscopic [...]
