======================================================================= Cybernetics in the 3rd Millennium (C3M) -- Volume 2 Number 2, Feb. 2003 Alan B. Scrivener --- http://www.well.com/~abs --- mailto:abs@well.com ======================================================================= "Biological Computing: The Next Big Thing? (Part One)" As a youth one of my main heroes was Leonardo da Vinci, and I wanted to be a Renaissance Man like him. His sketches of helicopters and parachutes appealed to me the most; his anatomy studies the least. But the last "life sciences" class I took (with one exception which I'll mention later) was sophomore biology in high school, taught by the football coach, and infamous because of its "health" (code for "sex education") segment, and for the frog dissecting that seemed designed to discourage most of us from wanting to be doctors. So I had set a course to become a so-called Renaissance Man with little biological sense. In my 12th grade I happened upon the "Whole Earth Catalog" which seemed like the kind of thing a Renaissance Man would read. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1892907054/hip-20 ) I quickly discovered that it was filled with glib, counter-culture prognostications like: "ecology and education are going to come together, and the schools don't know it." I found that its editor, Stewart Brand, had been a biology major, and his search for an understanding of whole systems came with a life sciences perspective. It was from the Whole Earth Catalog that I learned both the word and the ideas behind cybernetics. The most interesting thing about Norbert Weiner's work was his mathematical tools for function prediction and his ideas for feedback mechanisms; the least interesting was his collaboration with physician Arturo Rosenblueth and his detailed examinations of biological systems. One of the amazing things the Catalog pointed me at was the computer-simulated apocalypse in "The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind" (1972) by Donella and Dennis Meadows. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451136950/hip-20 ) It used computer models to predict that in the absence of mitigating factors our technological civilization would "crash" somewhere around 2000 to 2010 (depending on some assumptions). It got my attention. Clearly, we needed to hop on this right away, and begin producing more detailed models and studying these preliminary results very thoroughly. Meanwhile the Whole Earth Catalog had its own apocalypse to contend with. It was losing money with every issue, so Brand decided to shut it down, publishing the "Last Whole Earth Catalog" in 1972. It became a surprise New York Times bestseller, and two years later Brand revived it as the "Whole Earth Epilog: Access to Tools" (1974) ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140039503/hip-20 ) This new edition highlighted the ideas of Gregory Bateson, who coincidentally lived four doors down from me on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Through a series of events I describe elsewhere, he became my mentor, and among the important things he taught me where: * the best way to develop a good intuition for complex systems (and to approach a state of wisdom) is to study natural history, that is, the record of what life has done * in any biological system, no variable can grow with an unlimited exponential curve -- something will "crash" eventually His most recent book at the time was his collection of short works: "Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology" (1972) by Gregory Bateson ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226039056/hip-20 ) The hardcover edition included a short 1970 essay cut from the paperback edition, "On Emptyheadedness Among Biologists and State Boards of Education," which asserted: "Evolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students -- and even professional biologists -- acquire theories of evolution without any deep understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory." He observed that in attempting to resist the pseudo-scientific agenda of creationists, evolutionists were becoming inflexible and dogmatic themselves. Soon afterwards I got Bateson to sponsor me in a student-directed seminar called "Understanding Whole Systems," in which I attempted to organize all knowledge the way a Renaissance Man should. When I got to the session on biology, I drew a blank; I still didn't feel I knew enough to say anything non-trivial. A few weeks later Stewart Brand came to town and I got him to address my seminar. It was a pleasant enough session (I had him grappling with the not-very-fruitful question, "What is reality?") but he also addressed a Cybernetics class offered by the Information Science department, and I sat in on it. Brand was singing the praises of a book he was reading, and had not even finished, called "Perspectives in Ecological Theory" (1968) by Ramon Margalef. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226505065/hip-20 ) He called it a "tough little book," but insisted it was the most cybernetic thinking on ecology he'd read. He was impressed that Margalef had done most of his work with ocean plankton, but had drawn conclusions that seemed to apply to most ecosystems. A few months after that Brand reprinted an abridged form of the book in his magazine The CoEvolution Quarterly (Summer 1975) -- the same issue that was the first non-specialist publication to carry the Gaia Hypothesis by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock. Having read the whole book, I'd actually say it was improved by the editing (a little less detail on plankton, thank you) as well as by the charming but informative diagrams by Peter Warshall and Carol Kramer. The book begins with a look at the "classic" approach to systems: model a set of variables connected by Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs), and then stand back and say: "B-but we can't solve these analytically." Then he goes on to identify "heuristics" he's developed for "rule of thumb" analysis where rigor fails. This is quite like the approach taken by Ludwig Von Bertalanffy in "General System Theory" (1968). ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807604534/hip-20 ) But Margalef has some better heuristics. Starting with the bald fact that predators tend to remember more than their prey (the prey only learn when the predation attempt fails), he goes on to develop a powerful abstraction of the idea of "exploitation." The next year I finally took my one college course in a life science: it was an interdisciplinary seminar taught by Gregory Bateson (an inter-disciplinarian in his own right, whose father, after all, had coined the word "genetics") and Robert Edgar, (who was lured away from Cal Tech to found Kresge College at UCSC; I'm told that if he had stayed, and finished mapping the DNA of the tobacco mosaic virus -- the first organism whose genome was completely mapped -- he would have certainly gotten the Nobel Prize). The course was called "The Evolutionary Idea," and the name was a three-way pun which referred to: * the idea of evolution (evolution as mental process) * the evolution of ideas (minds and thought processes as an analog to natural selection) * the evolution of evolution (how the theory of evolution has evolved) One of the problems we wrestled with was the "punctuated equilibrium" in the fossil record. Nowhere do we actually see a species being created, despite Darwin's claim to have explained "The Origin of Species" with the theory of natural selection. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517123207/hip-20 ) Instead, we see species remaining constant, except for mostly changes in the sizes of parts, for millions of years. The argument made is usually that the creation of species happens too fast for the fossil record to catch. But biologists have struggled to explain why. I argued the idea that DNA could somehow detect "stress" in the phenotype (organism bodies) and increase its own rate of mutation of the genotype in response, so that DNA could control its own rate of change. They were aghast -- not because they thought I was wrong (they actually sort of liked the idea) but because it went against the "central dogma" of Watson and Crick, and no such research could get funded in the current academic climate. I had to ask myself why scientific researchers who were supposed to be searching for truth would ever use the word "dogma" to describe their preliminary results. At one of the last class meetings Bob Edgar had just returned from a conference at which it had been revealed that DNA had the power to edit itself prior to being transcribed into RNA, forming complex structures that included loops. (I think this may have been an early hint of the research later published as "The structure of histone-depleted metaphase chromosomes, Paulson J. R., and Laemmli U. K. (1977), Cell 12, 817- 828. My final paper for the class wrestled with the question of the minimum computational requirements for intelligence without much success. (Conclusion: less than the universe but more than a single binary switch was required.) As a parting gift, Bob Edgar gave me a copy of the classic "On Growth and Form" by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1917). ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486671356/hip-20 ) (I remember Bateson complaining that Thompson seemed to have scoured the natural world for examples of growth and form that could be explained with pure physics, without any cybernetic thinking, but -- hey -- it was 1917, and he was trying to show skeptics that biology could be a quantitative science) He also gave me a well-worn a copy of "Molecular Biology of the Gene (2nd Edition)" (1970) by James D. Watson, on condition that I read both books. I tried, Bob, I really did, but Thompson is such a polymath that you need to know French, Latin and the Greek myths just to read his introduction, and Watson's work is so full of organic chemistry... FYI: Watson's "Molecular Biology of the Gene (4th Edition)" (2001) is still in print. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805396144/hip-20 ) Well, it was a long, strange trip from the seventies to the nineties. I mostly concentrated on earning a living, and so got sucked into the microcomputer revolution along with a lot of other folks. Every now and then I tried studying some biology. One book that shall remain nameless, which attempted to integrate cybernetics and cell biology, tackled the question of how much information a cell "contained." Well, I knew from studying Shannon's original work on communication theory that information is defined only as a measure of data communicated, not data "in" something. See "Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1950), by Claude E. Shannon, Warren Weaver. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0252725484/hip-20 ) But in the late 1970s and the 1980s, cybernetics was dying on the vine. Biologists and social scientists seemed the only people paying it lip service -- goodness knows the information science community completely ignored it. But what came along in the mid-1980s to keep the young-uns excited were fractals and chaos. (Also, in science fiction, "cyberpunk" appeared, with its dark biotech-influenced future, but that's another story.) I find it interesting that one of the big breakthroughs in chaos, May's discovery of strange attractors in the logistic equation, came in the context of environmental system modeling. Today, you can see chaos in the popular software toy "sharks and fishes," available in several Java versions: ( http://www.leinweb.com/snackbar/wator/ ) ( http://www.stensland.net/java/erin.html ) My own interest in chaos, as latest keeper of the "systems theory" flame, led me to the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematicians (SIAM) Conference on Dynamical Systems in Orlando, FL, May 7-11 1990. I was there along with my friend Dave Warner, who was a MD/PhD candidate at Loma Linda University at the time, and his advisor, Dr. Douglas Will. Our conversations concerned mostly chaos in the nervous system. It was also on that trip that I first experienced "The Wonders of Life" pavilion at Walt Disney World's EPCOT theme park, and its motion-base ride "Body Wars." ( http://www.netcot.com/Theme.Parks/Epcot.Center/Future.World/BodyWars/ ) It is arguably based loosely on the movie "Fantastic Voyage" (1966), in that you are "shrunk" to a tiny size and then voyage through a human body. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/6301744160/hip-20 ) During this trip I experienced a rare apotheosis, in which I realized that the 1990s would be a decade of breakthroughs in human health and "life extension" technology, and this was going to impact my mental development and career a great deal. I still remember exactly where I was at that moment, while walking for exercise, at the corner of East Buena Vista Drive and & Hotel Plaza Blvd., Lake Buena Vista, FL: ( http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?size=big&mapdata=lZfCwkldBIx8fCTNLFEsPWM%2fPjevTpoVriBkGPt95az2Vs23seB96ok1iUR%2biH2S2U%2f3wt%2fpSjpn%2bWfHGJ%2bH6FQ%2bo6sPNRCWWPY4Iz%2bARqSKvm%2fUdf6y1PHvMCJ3D5HbOpqEn%2ba4ATHFWWfiK7zaZOEOgXRNIf6MWY9g9CC3D1eTyMTSKTAK6B7gGbkrkor0JBRn5Vnvbv4ZPCi5%2bZDWdh5Bylm83EN4ml%2fdcCSceHY1%2bxaNXeKPR%2bwMwry9QmL68Yrp8VPsjnABW8kCPoXh4l5OhBYeKxmkCxv4cMnjT9GgcZNlRMK7YDi0YQzSzxbWdBA7IEfzBkUf9NuZD3H9YMM73mK%2fATe8nQSyl6yWv4cu8ckO9dASl1wO3q4ThBADie%2b6VlRbRH5xAbw4W2gXWQKp24w8qgEiwMBhXgWReGTxxkzDbU%2fkNw%3d%3d ) (Continuing interest brought me to another SIAM conference on dynamical systems at Snowbird, UT, in October of 1992. They continue to this day; the next one is the "SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems," May 27-31, 2003, Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort, Snowbird, UT, sponsored by SIAM Activity Group on Dynamical Systems: http://www.siam.org/meetings/ds03/index.htm There is also a new "SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems" http://epubs.siam.org/sam-bin/dbq/toclist/SIADS which just published its first issue.) One of things I did with my new "aha" was to begin a quest. I was working for a family of companies involved in scientific computing and simulation, going by the names Stellar, Ardent, Stardent, Kubota and Advanced Visual Systems. (Through acquisitions and spin-offs I kept getting new business cards but keeping the same customers.) Initially most of our customers had been aerospace companies, military weapons labs and Department of Energy (DOE) labs which were famous for building the first nuclear weapons. Because this seemed like such a waste of technology to me, and because the Berlin Wall had just fallen and the Soviet Union was about to as well, my quest was to "beat swords into plowshares" and convert the use of this technology (high-speed computing and 3D visualization) to medical research. To this end, one of things I did -- at the urging of Dave Warner -- was to begin attending and presenting at a new conference called "Medicine Meets Virtual Reality -- Discovering Applications for 3-D Multi-Media Technology in the Health Sciences." For the first conference I presented a paper, "The Somascope: A Tool for Guided Self-Healing Using Medical Imaging" (1992). ( http://www.well.com/~abs/Somascope/Somascope.html ) For the second conference I presented "The Impact of Visual Programming in Medical Research" (1994). ( http://www.well.com/~abs/impact_vis_med.html ) By this time I was at AVS, Inc., and I was both trying to push the medical world into using AVS's technology and trying to get AVS to recognize this new market. Ultimately, I succeeded. The largest sale in the company's history, which I was instrumental in closing, went to ADAC Laboratories, a manufacturer of Gamma Cameras -- medical scanners that photographed gamma rays inside patients who'd swallowed isotope "cocktails," in order to image metabolism in process. (ADAC is now owned by iotech; the ADAC web site redirects there.) ( http://www.adac.com ) I remember around 1994 or 5 sitting in a session at Med VR while a video was being shown of endoscopic surgery. In this breakthrough technique, instead of opening up a patient's abdomen like a Dutch door, a small incision is made and a cable much like a plumber's "snake" with a camera and scalpel on the end is inserted, allowing remote control surgery and, of course, reduced recovery time. It was grossing me out. I remembered again how, after the frog dissecting in high school, I knew I didn't want to be a doctor. But my wife, sitting next to me, who had been trained as an Animal Health Technician (AHT) and had assisted in many veterinary surgeries, said, "Look at that pink, healthy tissue!" It was beautiful to her. But I found myself attracted more towards the use of computers to simulate living things. My friend Phil Mercurio returned from a trip to New Mexico in 1992 talking about a conference he had attended there: "Artificial Life III." The proceedings are still available; see "Proceedings of the Workshop on Artificial Life Held June, 1992 in Santa Fe, New Mexico" (Santa Fe Institute) Christopher G. Langton, editor. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201624923/hip-20 ) One of the things he liked the most was a prototype robot construction kit that later evolved into the Lego Mindstorms programmable Lego robots for kids. See "The Mini Board Technical Reference" by Fred G. Martin. ( http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/people/fredm/papers/mb/ ) (There is now an International Society for Artificial Life, with a web site at: http://www.alife.org/ helping to promote and carry on this important work.) I still remember jotting some notes in the mid-1970s for a genetic simulation program which I never implemented (shame on me). My ideas did make it into a short story I wrote for "The Journal of Transfigural Mathematics." ( http://www.transmath.de/ ) It was called "Sleazy Weasels," and you can read it on-line: ( http://www.well.com/user/abs/Writing/Fiction/TECB/SW.html ) The best guide for the lay reader on artificial life is "Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology" (1993) by Steven Levy. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679743898/hip-20 ) There are two things I found especially interesting about this book: * In simulations of evolution -- which arguably were actually EXAMPLES of evolution -- it had turned out that parasites were vital to genetic health. First, parasites had appeared where they weren't expected, and then, it turned out that artificial organisms with parasites were more adaptive, since they were always playing "cat and mouse" games with the parasites. When their external environment changed, they could adapt more quickly since they were used to change and hadn't "overadapted" to their old environment. This shed some light on the "punctuated equilibrium" issue. Even when the phenotype wasn't observed to change, an organism with parasites had a constantly changing genotype. * The people making most of these breakthroughs, doing the research and attending the conferences, were mostly computer programmers and other "information science" types. They were having a hard time getting the biologists doing "wet lab" work interested, and in convincing them that the A-Life research was relevant to biology. About the same time Windows 95 was released I found myself drifting out of the scientific computing and visualization world and, partly because I became a father, concentrating more on earning a living, and so got sucked into the internet revolution along with a lot of other folks. About six years later the dot com crash left me looking for the Next Big Thing in the spring of 2001. One person I went to see was Art Olson, at the Scripps Research Institute, who told me "biological computing" was worth paying attention to. That summer, at the urging of Dave Warner -- who always seems to be the one lately who pushes me towards life sciences -- I went to the Bio2001 conference at the San Diego convention center. ( http://www.bio.org/events/2001/event2001home.html ) After seeing a bewildering array of exhibits by bio-tech companies like Avecia Biotechnology, BioImmunPharma GmbH, Capsulution Nanoscience AG, DYAX Corp., Elegene AG, FermPro Manufacturing LP, Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, Hybrigenics, Infigen, Jostra Medizintechnik AG, KoBioTech Co., Ltd., Lonza Biotechnology, Medarex, Inc. and so on, I decided I needed a break. I left convention center and walked over to Seaport Village, an outdoor fishing-village-themed shopping area, and stopped in at one of my favorite combination bookstore/espresso bars. I picked up a book off the "new arrivals" shelf: "Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters" by Matt Ridley (2000), which told the story of the Human Genome Project and its implications. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060932902/hip-20 ) In the foreword I read about the race between government-sponsored researchers in the United States and England, and the private company founded by scientists Craig Venter, to complete a map of the human genome by June of 2001. "On June 26, 200, President Bill Clinton in the White House and Prime Minister Tony Blair in Downing Street simultaneously announced that the rough draft was complete." As I stood reading those words the date was June 26, 2001, the first birthday of the completed rough draft. At that moment I experienced another rare apotheosis, in which I realized that the 2000s would be a decade of breakthroughs in the genomics and related bio-technologies, and this was going to impact my mental development and career a great deal. I still remember exactly where I was at that moment, at the Upstart and Crow Bookstore and Coffeehouse: ( http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?size=big&mapdata=jZ2g%2b%2fXW8V%2fm%2f%2bOYS0z6j6aQJvA%2frK%2fMYyTGl44mZrPBNjkBrhsznmZS3Gj6%2fq79XMis1IXp59JVvrH8WufdhuSrNHME18KbQnagSvC8CH05nBpK3t8k3pwh%2b74rrqEY65fW%2fKaCgbj8xw03f32PfffGsnlICGrhx5dCnqfjqnDGnpcQTTnbRFvH8rVDSOOCScu4RdIiI96Qf8J4bDPPZH7NCiL%2fukWrpKIOFMDoNFtZSDIkzUkjjLWdsMwbGKdZ0qZcq2tC1ZWlx%2fsKtGRsFPHp96g8%2fzMJFAD76zXyb2L1H4LnsjaXf8E2y51gXLTBjM0VBDVY0D%2flPcpL8kQAkK%2fwLORin%2fuIwE05qDqXMBGMED7VUnMG8g%3d%3d ) The following month I attended the SIGGRAPH 2001 Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center, devoted to 3D graphics and interactive technology. ( http://www.siggraph.org/conferences/ ) (This isn't germane to the main thrust of this essay, but it seems as good a place as any to insert this plug: the SIGGRAPH conference is coming to San Diego in July of 2003, and the San Diego chapter of SIGGRAPH is producing an event called SIGKIDS to promote the use of 3D graphics and interactive technologies for children. See: http://san-diego.siggraph.org/sigkids for more information.) As I sat on a couch in a lounge I was joined by an associate who said, "I'm still trying to figure out what the Next Big Thing is this year." It was a year in which the computer graphics industry was in decline -- Disney had consolidated its Feature Film Effects group with Dream Quest, a company it had bought, to form The Secret Lab, and then abruptly laid everyone off as a cost-saving measure; other production groups had similar woes; most the 3D vendors were suffering as well -- and a lot of people were looking for the Next Big Thing. "I've got that right here," I replied, and pulled out a copy of the newspaper "USA Today" which I'd found on a table. On the front page of the "Money" section for August 13, 2001 was this article: Pioneers shift gears -- from tech to biotech By Del Jones, USA TODAY Visionaries who ushered in the age of software, supercomputers and the Internet are turning to a new passion: biotechnology. * Danny Hillis -- pioneer of parallel computers, now the basis for most supercomputers -- has moved into genetics and neurobiology as chairman and chief technology officer of Applied Minds. * Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, is a big investor in and director of DNA Sciences, a gene-research company in the heart of the Silicon Valley in Fremont, Calif. * Internet pioneer Frank Moss sits on the advisory board of the Harvard Medical School and is director of a biotech start-up he would not identify. "Over the next years, diseases will be cured. That's a hell of a lot better than finding books, or other uses of the Internet we're even less proud of," Moss says. "This might be bigger or smaller than the Internet, but a lot more important." President Bush gave his limited go-ahead to embryonic stem-cell research Thursday. But many wealthy tech gurus left the starting gate a long time ago. Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Larry Ellison, three of the world's four richest men, are among the largest individual investors in biotech. Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has a particular interest in ventures trying to slow the aging process, a potential gold mine. Money follows visionaries. During the second 3 months of 2001, 14% of venture capital dollars went to medical/health/life science companies, vs. 4% during the same period of 2000, says Venture Economics. The share of capital going to Internet start-ups declined from 48% to 28%. "A tidal wave is about to come," Moss says. "Individuals are looking for a new gig." Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, former chief technology officer and chief software architect of Microsoft, are partners in a biotech think tank. Myhrvold speaks at biotech conferences, calling it the next "exponential industry" that will see fast growth and falling prices, like computer chips. The two have started a non-profit aimed at helping high school students form biotech clubs, just as many of today's technology billionaires have their entrepreneurial roots in the computer clubs of the 1970s. "Hey, we were part of a revolution that made a big difference," Jung says. "Here's the next revolution that's going to make a bigger difference." Jung says much of biotech still uses "primitive computer tools," and tech experts are being pulled into the field as much as they're pushing into it. Tech veterans have other lessons to teach an industry embarking on rapid growth. But there are cultural differences, Moss says. Traditional drug companies develop products over 10 years. Six months is a lifetime in the Internet. "There's a lot of getting used to one another," Moss says. ( http://www.usatoday.com/money/tech/2001-08-13-tech-to-biotech.htm ) Just one month later American went from a state of "deep peace" to trying to defend itself against terror attacks, and for the first time in its history was the victim of biological warfare. The old heavy metal group "Anthrax" announced on their web site that they were even considering changing their name to "basket full of puppies" because they felt so bad about their ironic name being associated with real suffering now that "the end of irony" had been heralded by Time Magazine. In short order I found myself under contract to Dave Warner's company, Mindtel LLC, to do research on ways to visualize potential bio-terrorism threats in San Diego. ( http://www.well.com/~abs/Mindtel/ ) After many meetings and conferences that exposed me to bio-terrorism preparedness planning, I came to the conclusion that it's a good thing WE (Americans) are not the terrorists, because we are so resourceful. There are frequent scenarios simulated with blue teams (good guys) and red teams (bad guys), and I learned that in any city in America you could kill millions and panic many millions more by simply -- ...but maybe I shouldn't be spreading this around. During this hysteria I re-read the novel "Jurassic Park" (1990) by Michael Crichton, which is more brutal and cautionary than the Spielberg movie it was made into. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345370775/hip-20 ) Mathematician and chaos expert Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum in the movie) dies in book, and in his final soliloquy he says: ...the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world... Then Godel's theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the language of science... And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives... We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now. Fifty years ago, everyone was gaga over the atomic bomb. That was power. No one could imagine anything more. Yet, a bare decade after the bomb, we began to have genetic power. And genetic power is far more potent than atomic power. And it will be in everyone's hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question -- What should I do with my power? -- which is the very question science says it cannot answer. Powerful prescience from a medical student turned best-selling author. And while I'm on the subject, the best novel I've read about bio- terrorism is "The Cobweb" by Stephen Bury (really Neal Stephenson and his uncle), which takes place during the Gulf War in 1990-91. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553575457/hip-20 ) Okay, fast forward one year. Now I'm writing this e-Zine. I'm finally getting around to finishing reading "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World" (1994) by Kevin Kelly, which I've been reading off and on for nine years. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201483408/hip-20 ) This is a layman's book, by a member of the Whole Earth Catalog crowd, that looks at a wide variety of things that he collects into "the rise of neo-biological civilization." And I find myself wondering, what did Art Olson mean by "biological computing" in the spring of 2001? I thought I knew at the time, but Kelly's book has reminded me that, as Shakespeare says in "Macbeth," There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. So I called him up and made an appointment. On December 5, 2002, I sat down with Art to probe this question further. TO BE CONTINUED... ======================================================================= newsletter archives: http://www.well.com/~abs/Cyb/4.669211660910299067185320382047/ ======================================================================= Privacy Promise: Your email address will never be sold or given to others. You will receive only the e-Zine C3M unless you opt-in to receive occasional commercial offers directly from me, Alan Scrivener, by sending email to abs@well.com with the subject line "opt in" -- you can always opt out again with the subject line "opt out" -- by default you are opted out. To cancel the e-Zine entirely send the subject line "unsubscribe" to me. I receive a commission on everything you purchase during your session with Amazon.com after following one of my links, which helps to support my research. ======================================================================= Copyright 2003 by Alan B. Scrivener