Saying that the Long Now seminars are great is starting to feel repetitive. So, please go out and listen to ALL of them.
I’ve caught up with all the seminars that have been made available. One that I want to point out is Juan Enriquez’s seminar on biology, politics, evolution, and science (link to post on seminar, below).
Wow.
He’s such a low key speaker, but delivers such strong points. (though if you look at some of the comments in the post linked below, some folks were not as pleased)
There were a few items he mentioned that were pretty interesting:
1) He’s friends with Craig Venter and traveled for a time on Venter’s yacht, Sorcerer II, which was traveling the oceans, sampling micro-organisms every 200 miles by sequencing the whole she-bang. It’s one more amazing Nobel-worthy thing Venter has been doing that has absolutely upended biology, genomics, and science. Enriquez called it the age of Metagenomics.
Of note, off all the organisms that they sequenced, about 75% were absolutely new. That’s 75%. New. It really made clear the prevalence of microorganisms in the ocean and points to microbes being half the biomass on Earth. And these organisms are critical to the health of the planet and we are risking up-turning the cart through warming and acidification of the oceans.
2) In his lateral thinking way, Enriquez pointed out that the gas in coal mines is due to bacterial digestion of the coal. He said that mining is so dangerous, why don’t we just use bacteria and pipe the gas out safely? It sure would be better than strip-mining. Heh.
3) He went off on superbugs, bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic we can throw at it. He blames it in part to our (inevitable) cleanliness in hospitals. As we wipe everything down, only the hardiest can survive. And then, we provide these bugs a great chance to infect people as we hack them open in the very same areas.
Made me pause and think about how we do medicine.
4) He also had a good comment on the decrease in the number of new drugs pharma has been able to come out with. He ascribes that in part to the mounting difficulty in passing safety standards. He called it the ‘Precautionary Principle’ – we are forcing pharma to make drugs that kill no one. But, how many thousand will die without the drug? He called on folks to weigh the needs of the very many versus the needs of the very few.
Kevin Kelly, a Long Now founder, suggested Enriquez call his view the ‘Pro-actionary Principle’.
Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » Juan Enriquez ‘Mapping Life’:
"All life is imperfectly transmitted code," Enriquez began, "and it is promiscuous." Thus discoveries like the one last month of an entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene lineages with gene webs.
