The 1970s meeting that changed biology
Plus other science things from the internet
Earlier this year I got very fascinated by the 1975 Asilomar conference, which has pretty much shaped how biologists to this day remain very careful about genetic engineering. This meeting was called after scientists realised that genetic engineering wasn’t just interesting biochemistry in the lab, but could be used to alter DNA of organisms in the wild as well. It had to be kept in check, so they paused their work and several top biologists of the ‘70s met at Asilomar in California to discuss the next steps.
This conference also stood as a model for later meetings where biologists had to decide whether other technical advances were safe or not. Because biologists themselves are often the first to realise when something has the potential to be dangerous, they got into the habit of pulling on the brakes themselves and ensuring that there are proper regulations in place for the work. That all dates back to Asilomar!
JSTOR Daily kindly let me nerd out about it and dive into their archives. That article came out a few weeks ago, and I should have mentioned it in the previous newsletter. I blame the heatwave for forgetting, but the weather is a lot better now!
Pivot to video! (Or maybe just add a few here and there)
I’m trying something new, where I made a short video about an article I recently wrote. I used the new Sophiana app for this, but I made extensive edits to the script it suggested. I’ll do a few more and then review the app on TikTok, probably.
This is the article, which I also linked to in the previous issue.
And this is the video I made based on that:
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Interesting links
How 16th-century artist Joris Hoefnagel made insects beautiful—and changed science forever. By Colin Marshall for Open Culture
If you happen to be at CERN, they’ve got a temporary exhibit of sculptures by Slovak artist Ján Zoričák, some of which were created using materials from CERN experiments.
Otherwise, if you happen to be in London, the annual Summer Science Exhibition is on at the Royal Society until Sunday. There are a lot of interesting things happening here, but the project that captured my attention was the one where people are encouraged to collect toilet water to help scientists search for phages as a potential alternative to antibiotics.
Keeping with the toilet theme, there is an Australian science museum dedicated to poo that invites artists to create art with animal poo. There are some pictures in this article (by Lucie Cutting for ABC) that are worth looking at because this actually looks good!
Memory is shaped by the music we listen to. By me for Forbes.com