Tag Archives: cells

Critical Thinking Quote Watch: Derek Bok on the Primary Goal of a College Education (and Higher Education’s General Failure at Reaching It)

The following quote comes from Derek Bok’s book, Our Underachieving Colleges (Princeton 2006, p. 8): Many [college] seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, … Continue reading

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Blogging David Goodsell’s “The Machinery of Life” (Evolution, Scale, and the Counter-Intuitive Nano-Realm)

David Goodsell is a molecular biologist at The Scripps Research Institute in California, and he has written a hippie-beautiful introductory text to molecular biology, The Machinery of Life (2nd edition, Springer 2010), which Scientific American calls “an impressive and original book.” I call it “hippie-beautiful” because … Continue reading

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Blogging David Goodsell’s “The Machinery of Life” (Chapter 1)

David Goodsell is a molecular biologist at The Scripps Research Institute in California, and he has written a hippie-beautiful introductory text to molecular biology, The Machinery of Life (2nd edition, Springer 2010), which Scientific American calls “an impressive and original book.” I call it “hippie-beautiful” because … Continue reading

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Biotech and Robotics: The Two Great Technology Waves That Are Coming

A pretty powerful quote from the BigThink website: [Managing Director of Excel Venture Management, Juan] Enriquez stresses that “life code” (the famous A, G, T, C of DNA) will have the same importance for the next generation as digital code (1’s … Continue reading

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The first synthetic cell

Craig Venter crosses a threshold. This today in the New York Times: Dr. Venter described the converted cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” “This is an important step, we think, … Continue reading

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