Discover, June 26, 2004

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The question took me by surprise. I was sitting in a noisy Boston cafe with two biochemists who were having a straight-faced conversation about putting together a budget to create synthetic life-forms. Next to me was Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School, and across the table was Steven Benner, who had flown up from the University of Florida to pay Szostak a visit. The conversation was thrumming along, touching on the efficiencies of chemical reactions and the like, when Benner abruptly turned to me and asked, “How much do you think it would cost to create a self-replicating organism capable of Darwinian evolution?”

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Newsweek, June 6, 2004

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Wireless technology lets us talk on cell phones with people thousands of miles away, surf the Web without a cable and control our stereos, DVD players and televisions. But none of this technology works without pushing buttons or giving voice commands. Imagine what it would be like if we could turn our brains into remote controls, sending wireless commands to computers, robots and other machines.

It’s not so farfetched. Like a computer, the brain is made up of many little units wired together to process information digitally. Where computers use zeros and ones, neurons encode our thoughts in all-or-nothing electrical impulses. And if computers and brains speak the same language, it should be possible for the two to speak to each other.

Continue reading “The Ultimate Remote Control” →

Science, May 28, 2004

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STONY BROOK, NEW YORK—On a recent sunny Saturday, scientists from the United States, Canada, and Europe gathered at the State University of New York (SUNY), Stony Brook, to talk about their research. A geneticist from Harvard University spoke about preeclampsia, a potentially fatal condition during pregnancy. An ichthyologist described the loyalty—or lack thereof—that male fish show to the mothers of their offspring. Psychologists discussed economic decision-making. A psychiatrist reviewed some of the genes associated with clinical depression.

Continue reading “Stretching the Limits of Evolutionary Biology” →

Discover, April 20, 2004

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Dinner with a philosopher is never just dinner, even when it’s at an obscure Indian restaurant on a quiet side street in Princeton with a 30-year-old post-doctoral researcher. Joshua Greene is a man who spends his days thinking about right and wrong, and how we separate the two. He has a particular fondness for moral paradoxes, which he collects the way some people collect snow globes.

“Let’s say you’re walking by a pond and there’s a drowning baby,” Greene says, over chicken tikka masala. “If you said, ‘I’ve just paid $200 for these shoes and the water would ruin them, so I won’t save the baby,’ you’d be an awful, horrible person. But there are millions of children around the world in the same situation, where just a little money for medicine or food could save their life. And yet we don’t consider ourselves monsters for having this dinner rather than giving the money to Oxfam. Why is that?”

Continue reading “Whose Life Would You Save?” →