How I went from hating it to being obsessed, the allure of great writing, and a post-scuba-dive moment of clarity
jsomers.net | I should have loved biology
In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.
b.next: rebuilding biology for engineering
I was born and raised in South Jersey. As a kid, I was passionately interested in music, science and nature. Within a year of entering college, I discovered neuroscience and quickly became enamored by the prospect of understanding human cognition in the context of experiment and data-driven analysis.
Design in The Age of Biology: Shifting From a Mechanical-Object Ethos to an Organic-Systems Ethos
In the early twentieth century, our understanding of physics changed rapidly; now, our understanding of biology is undergoing a similar rapid change.
The Scientist Who Scrambled Darwin’s Tree of Life (Published 2018)
How the microbiologist Carl Woese fundamentally changed the way we think about evolution and the origins of life.
How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers. Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time). With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined. Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.
Developing creative identity
I was a theoretical physicist from 1992 to 2007. It was a romantic activity, exploring the fundamental nature of the cosmos! I became a university professor, wrote papers and books, and got to explore some of the most beautiful ideas ever discovered. In parallel, I also developed a fascination with the social systems humanity uses to make knowledge. Systems like the university or peer review are immensely deep inventions: our discovery system is itself one of the great inventions of humanity! But I believed a radically better discovery system must be possible. I became obsessed with this idea, eventually giving up tenure to work on it1. My first big project was to write a book helping develop and spread the fundamental ideas underlying the modern open science movement.
Decolonising Science Reading List
In the last couple of weeks, a lot of people have been asking me about what I’ve been reading as reference points for my commentary on the…
Why I left the editorial board of the prestigious scientific journal NeuroImage — and helped start something new
Scientists like Shella Keiholz are beginning to rebel against the unjustifiable waste of resources by traditional scientific research journals.
Shut Up and Prove - Hyperproblems
TLDR; We are at an asteroid hitting the earth level of crisis of intellectual life. My first love was the foundations of mathematics. Or maybe the second lo…
Shut Up and Prove - Hyperproblems
TLDR; We are at an asteroid hitting the earth level of crisis of intellectual life. My first love was the foundations of mathematics. Or maybe the second lo…
Guest post: If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it
Loren K. Mell Editor’s note: This post responds to a Feb. 13 article in The Atlantic, “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save Us Now,” written by Retraction Watch cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oran…
Politics? In My Fandom? - Dhole Moments
I dislike politics in general. That doesn’t mean I don’t write about it when it’s relevant, but I’m always less happy with any of my writing that touches on these subjects. …
50 Ideas That Changed My Life - David Perell
David shares 50 ideas that changed his life. Read here.
"There is a contrast between my biological development, confidently realizing its in-built norm, and my fumbling psychological development, realizing partially..one among many apparently possible orders .. Learning what to want is the most radical, the most painful and the most creative art of life"
