science vs. technology

I'm writing from Costa Rica today. I came over to the internet cafe this morning to work on the annual report, check the news, and share some thoughts. I'm highly distracted.

I read Steven Shapin's article in Seed Magazine about The State of the Scientist in 2008. We invited Dr. Shapin to SynBERC's semi-annual retreat and site visit last March, and at least provisionally he is a member of our scientific advisory board. He notes how scientists these days are increasingly comfortable working at the overlapping boundaries of industry and academia. He also notes that many researchers don't care whether their work is considered "science" or "technology": What they are interested in is creating something that produces "cures, power, and, of course, profit." Shapin goes on to observe that the ramifications of new research fields like synthetic biology are impelling modern technoscientific ventures "into new collaborations with humanists and social scientists about the very nature of the work and the institutional environments in which [they are] taking place." He specifically uses SynBERC to illustrate many of the above trends.

There's something to be said for the dissolution of the science-technology boundary. In synthetic biology, we need to further our fundamental understanding of biological processes to achieve some of those goals. And we need practitioners in industry and academia to build robust new tools, techniques, and systems from that fundamental knowledge base. But both science and technology ought to be slaves to higher humanistic goals in health and the environment. I think that's one of the guiding principles and defining characteristics of synthetic biology.

Science in the new White House? Really??

Despite the mostly sordid, scandalous, and otherwise depressing trudge of life that is Gooogle News, I can't help but be giddy when I see that Steven Chu is among the top searches. Coming back from the SynBERC PI meeting in Chicago last night, who would you know was on the plane but Dr. Chu himself. He must have been returning from the announcement of his appointment to Secretary of Energy earlier in the day with Obama. I caught up with him before the baggage claim and, a bit star-struck myself, offered a quick congratulations and thanks for giving those of us who support science a measure of optimism that things could get done. He seemed almost startled that a random traveler would know or care, smiled, and mumbled a modest acknowledgment. Earlier in the day he was standing beside our transformational president-elect, prepared to change the flow of energy in the world. I can't imagine how strange this all must seem to Dr. Chu: I have to pinch myself, and I'm just a social technocrat looking in.

Am I becoming a Republican?

I'm highly ambivalent about the five-day UC strike this week by custodians, bus drivers, cooks and parking attendants. On one hand, I strongly support good wages and working conditions for all workers. On the other hand, I fear that today's unions encourage an undue sense of entitlement among underperforming workers within the ranks. I strongly agree that the disparity between the top and bottom of the UC pay scale is too great, but I believe this is due to the university trying its best to compete with private universities and companies to attract the best talent to leadership positions. The growing divide between rich and poor is a by-product of American capitalism, not exploitative and self-enriching university administrators. In the end, I'm left to wonder if UC is the unfair scapegoat of the capitalism that sustains "the American dream," or whether it has a public mandate to buck the trend, even at its own peril.

Okay, so that's a bit of a tangent. But the strike does relate to my job and synthetic biology in two ways:

1. In general, the university does a bad job at being transparent. I don't think there's a lot of conversation, communication, and open dialogue between UC and workers about meaningful ways in which the university and workers can work together to improve wages, fiscal conditions, workers' economic status, working conditions, etc. Distrust foments when the university does not proactively engage its own employees and the community on university policy. At the research level, that kind of distrust fueled the Novartis controversy in 1998. We saw some of the same with the BP deal last year, and I think we're bound to see it with nanoscience and synthetic biology if we don't engage the community about their concerns and communicate the our research plans.

2. For better or worse, the university is led by academics, not professional managers. University leaders get their management training as they go, in the same way that I learn science as I go on an as-needed basis. But in an age of cross-disciplinarity, perhaps both administrators and academics need structured training in each other's domains. Professional management training for the university's leading academic posts could ward off labor disputes and public relations fiascoes before they happen, and lead to a more efficient, open campus. Similarly, "science for the layperson" kinds of training would help non-technical staff better understand the research process and culture, and in turn be better able to help researchers achieve their research goals.

The limits of design, and what is flourishing?

Marlee Tichenor interviewed me on Thursday as part of the Ars Synthetica project. In layperson's terms, I did my best to describe synthetic biology, iGEM, my roles and responsibilities, a typical day, etc. Then Marlee asked the three or four 30,000-foot questions that I knew were coming but had not yet seriously pondered. The questions seemed more philosophically interesting to be asked of research practitioners than me. But with the camera rolling and everything, I had to say something interesting, right? I was surprised by my own responses (if somewhat coarsely delivered) to two questions:

1. Are there limits to what we can design? "No" is the answer I came to. Much or most scientific progress proceeds along the conventional path of the scientist observing a system, hypothesizing an explanation to phenomenon, testing that hypothesis, integrating the new and existing knowledge into new theory, and then subjecting the new theory to the broader scientific community's scrutiny. Yet, there are some famous examples of fortuitous discoveries in the history of science that have not taken such a directed path, including Pasteur's vaccines against infectious disease, Roentgen's discovery of X-rays, and Galvani's discovery of the electrical basis of nerve signal transduction. For this reason, I think that future design has no practical limits because it is beyond what we can currently anticipate. At any given moment, designers can build new objects only in response to a known system. Yet the designed objects themselves will reveal new understandings of the system, and reveal unanticipated opporunities. In turn, the design process recycles. In this sense, design is not even limited by human imagination.

2. What is flourishing? My short answer was something like, "When the most people are engaged in meaningful activities." It just made gut-sense to me that I am flourishing when I get up in the morning and can work on a meaningful project. Then Marlee pressed me to explain what I meant by "meaningful." That was harder to answer, but I came around to the somewhat straightforward view that something's meaningfulness roughly relates to the number of people to whom something is meaningful. It might be meaningful today or in a thousand years, but the meaning has practical importance or utility to a large number of people. To take synthetic biology as an example, the field has a "democratic potential" for enabling researchers around the world to create local solutions to global challenges. Synbio might mean clean water in Africa, biojetfuel in the US, and information systems in Japan (pardon the canned examples). If a single scientific discipline can mean all of these things to all of these people, then I would say that it is very meaningful, and to engage in such a discipline is to flourish.

My ideas are still forming on these imposing questions, but I think I stumbled upon some good starting points.

sb4.0 - what's a technocrat to do?

I am second-guessing my decision to forego SB4.0 in order to attend a research administration conference going on at the same time. Sure, I'm an administrator who doesn't always understand the science very well. And intuitively, it seems too costly for me to travel to Hong Kong to listen to science talks. But maybe I'm just not making a strong enough effort to "get it." I feel like I need to understand what these (mostly) guys and (sprinkling of) gals are talking about. In a way, I also feel like I need to go to the research administration conference to teach people that, um, it's about the science.

It's disappointing to me how the research community draws such a striking line between "research" and "administration". Where are the people who straddle that line? Why isn't there a greater effort to educate administrators like me about science? I feel that I have to do backflips to get understandable science info out of researchers. I have to be willing to be talked down to. Maybe I need to be trained to do backflips, and trained to be talked down to. Maybe researchers need to be trained in communicating science to "regular" people.

project versus process: biodesign versus architecture

While in Chicago, I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art. At the bookstore I picked up "101 Things I Learned in Architecture School". It's filled with one or two sentence lessons like, "We move through negative spaces and dwell in positive spaces" and "Our experience of an architectural space is strongly influenced by how we arrive in it", followed by a few elaborating sentences and a simple illustration on the facing page. One of my favorites so far is "Improved design process, not a perfectly realized building, is the most valuable thing you gain from one design studio and take with you to the next." I think it's analogous to SynBERC in that the researchers comprise something more like a group of interrelated design studios and less like a team all building one specific thing. Also I really like the idea of organizing research into many studios. "Studio" connotes something with a discreet output and timeframe, and counterbalances the lofty and endless goal of "catalyzing biology as an engineering discipline." In a nutshell, studios break our grand challenge into bite-sized pieces.

I can't find a good definition for "design studio". Something like a study (in the sense of a drawing, sketch or painting done in preparation for a finished piece).

FOLLOW-UP:
I asked architect, professor, and brother-in-law Eric Bunge of nArchitects how he defined a studio. Though context dependent, it often means an instructional class. Except for the first few semesters, design studios typically focus on a single problem, increasing in complexity from year to year. An advanced design studio might involve professionals from other disciplines, such as engineers.

I think where I get hung up on the analogy between biology project and design studio is that, while both are a finite period of process development addressing a specific problem, the architectural design studio is by nature decoupled from hammers, trucks and getting your hands dirty. Biology process development cannot (at this point in time) be extracted from the actual "building" phase of assembling proteins, genes and markers. And in a way, I think that's part of the intellectual agenda of synbio.

I wonder how useful it is for bioengineers to sit in a room and sketch out a hypothetical cell with properties that address a specific problem. I've never really seen that happen before. Would that design process help to elucidate specific pathways and general strategies for producing biological problems? What if it happened over several weeks, as does in an architecture project? Does a successful biology project deserve any more or less of a design studio than a building? Does a $10M bioE research project deserve twice as much of a design studio as a $5M building?

me and the other ADs

Last week I went to Chicago for the annual meeting of administrative directors of all ERCs (engineering research centers). It's almost two years into SynBERC, and only now do I feel like I know everything I need to know to really kick ass at this. I wish I could start over.

The other ADs and I spend most of our meetings talking about the reporting requirements. It really hit me that the requirements force us to operate like glamorized bookkeepers. Sure, we can pump out long reports with all our publications, patents, students, courses, and underrepresented students, and sure it helps to justify our existence. But it doesn't help me to help get the research done.

and here we go

I chose this template because the dots remind me of a microarray, not that I've ever seen a real microarray. I guess microarrays would be useful in characterizing biological parts. I would like to understand a little better how a biofab operates. John and Chris were talking about part production versus automated cloning versus characterization. It made me realize how little I understand about what a synbio 'factory' would look like.