Ed RegisCritiques

Entertaining, and a good snapshot of personalities and activities at a particular time.½

This book is scary but well-written. George Church has done a commendable job in taking us through the advances in synthetic biology.

When he speaks of transhumans or "Humans +", then you realise we are on the cusp of changes that may alter us. Will the changes be good, or bad? No one knows.

His structuring is excellent, starting from prehistoric times, and taking us into the future.

The explanations are lucid, and the book is well-written.

However, he glosses over the dangers of the advances happening in this field. This attitude is a weakness of the book.

The dated nature of the science in this book made for a fascinating snapshot of the time at which I was starting to pay attention to what was going on in the wider world of mathematics, and for that I greatly appreciated it.

The book recognises that its subjects are not perfect, and that at best it is scraping the surface of what it could be discussing. Each chapter foregrounds an individual from the Institute, which worked well to give a feel for how things were, without being entirely tedious.

The writing flows, the subject matter is interesting, the individuals range from infuriating to fascinating, and it was worth reading. I had originally intended to pass this one on after reading, but I think I'm going to keep it, because the discussion about what was going on with some of the researchers and their special topics at the time (Mandelbrot, Wolfram come to mind, but there was at least one other) I may well want to revisit.

I had no idea biology had made so many advances in the last 20 years: reviving extinct species from DNA; cells from completely synthetic gene sequences; Lego-like DNA kits; DYI gene engineering literally done in people's garages.

This is either a very poorly constructed argument for a taxonomy of technology that forever loses the thread when it wanders into blimps, or a decent history of the folly of Zeppelins with a malformed treatise on the author's invented "pathological technologies" grafted on. Either half can't be given more than three stars, and this is not a case where there's anything gained by pairing them together.

I don't even necessarily think the author's theory is wrong or uninteresting, but the examples he chooses seem spectacularly ill-advised and not internally consistent. He also presents an extraordinarily narrow of view of how science happens and what benefits any individual project or research brings.

Written two centuries earlier, one can imagine the scorn brought onto "electricity" — imagine the immense expense of installing wires into every home simply in order to give light, which we already have with fire. How could one possibly hope to harness such a fundamental energy of the cosmos?

Extra bonus raspberries are due for attempting to sarcastically damn with faint praise a DARPA project as having an "original" way of doing things because the agency funded an outlandish idea (a 100-Year Starship program) in the hopes that something good might come out of it — in other words, every DARPA project, ever.

Just when I was starting to feel a little self-conscious about my list so far being dominated by graphic novels and children's books, I managed to plow through this tome. Okay, that's an unfair characterization. At times, I was enraptured by this book. I delivered spontaneous lectures to my husband and my co-workers. I posted quotes on Facebook. I engaged in conversation with a cashier who took my money after I spent a lunch period reading voraciously. But to get to these amazing stories, to get to those turns of phrase that were so poetical and profound that I was moved to claim this book as a part of my personal gospel, there was a lot to plow through.

To say this book was uneven would be a master understatement. Church gave himself an ambitious structure -- telling the progress of synthetic biology as a parallel to the processes of natural evolution. It was a wonderful concept, and in the places where it worked it was brilliant. But in other chapters it was so clearly forced that I wished he hadn't bothered. I also found it strange where he chose to explain concepts in great detail (like the chirality of organic molecules) and where there seemed to be no attempt to explain at all (exactly how one obtains sequences of synthetic DNA -- something central to most of the enterprises in his book.) Finally, there are so many mentions of Church's own work, Church's various business start-ups and organizations that eventually it prompted some eye-rolling.

Why, with all this complaining, would I still give this book four out of five stars? Well, because the content is simply amazing. It is hard to walk away from this book and not be awe-struck at what mere mortals have been able to achieve with the tools of science, hopeful for the future, and even a mystical sense of connection with it all. There are amazing stories in here, of synthetic cyanobacteria that can synthesize diesel fuel from the sun, synthetic organisms that can sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in large quantities, scientists working to resurrect species from extinction, possible treatments for cancer, therapies that could render organisms immune to all viruses, and so much more -- an international competition inspiring college students on shoestring budgets to engineer possible solutions to an astonishing variety of problems.

Of course, there are ethical considerations in this work, and there are moments (especially in the very beginning), where Church is annoyingly starry-eyed. But what Church sets out to do here is to impress us with the audacity of his dream. (And how close much of it is to reality!) And I must admit, I'm walking away a little starry-eyed myself.

This book presents a fascinating approach to "pathological technology," advancements that are inherently foolhardy and dangerous yet are so cool that people persist in perpetuating it anyway. The main focus (about 2/3 of the book) is on the Hindenburg, and that's where the book excels. Regis shows the evolution of airship tech through the 19th century and the vital role played by Zeppelin, and how the "Delirium" induced by airships caused his company to flourish despite sequential airship disasters. The details on the Hindenburg disaster are fascinating and well-written.

Where the book feels less persuasive is in chapters on atomic advancements and future space technology, especially the latter. Maybe I've simply succumbed to science fiction "delirium" myself, as a writer in the genre, but I felt like he was sneering at scientific developments that don't exist yet and had no right to judge them as "pathological yet."

While not a perfect book, it is a fairly quick read and certainly worthwhile for the data on the rise and fall (literally and figuratively) of airships.

This is out of date now ( 1990 ) The net has made this kind of book not very useful anymore ( but it would have been in 90 )

The field of synthetic biology is a wide-reaching one, whose potential includes everything from engineering microbes to produce petroleum, to bringing the mammoth back from extinction, to perhaps even creating entire new genomes from scratch. It's a fascinating and important topic, and the authors cover some rather mind-blowing possibilities. (Some of which, frankly, seem a little insane. Church seems weirdly attached, for instance, to the idea of creating humans made of molecules of the opposite handedness to the ones used in natural biology. They'd be immune to existing viruses and parasites! Of course, they also wouldn't be able to digest regular food. And they'd probably smell funny. But, hey, those are mere details, right?)

Unfortunately, I don't think the book, in general, is as good as its subject matter. Scientist George Church and journalist Ed Regis wrote it together, and while there's nothing unusual in that, the result in this case feels awkward and lacking in a coherent sense of who its intended audience is. Sections of it are dense and technical and filled with inside baseball details about labs and research and funding. Some of it I had a lot of trouble following, despite having passed a college-level microbiology class. (Although, admittedly, that was a long time ago, and I possibly should have had more sleep before tackling this book than I did. Still.) Other parts read exactly like a magazine article aimed at the nonscientific public. Some parts are a bizarre hybrid of the two, including one notable instance in which a deeply technical chapter features some only vaguely relevant journalist-style human interest bookends tacked on at the beginning and end. Maybe there's a metaphorical appropriateness there, for a book that features so much gene-splicing, but it didn't make for a particularly smooth read.

Not the most original book, but then again you might have guessed that from a book that repeats the title of a classic 60 year old book and has chapters that repeat the titles of some classic papers (e.g., The Spandrels of Saint Marco).

But it is a thoughtful, excellent, enjoyable, if occasionally journalist, overview of the title question. And most important it is completely up-to-date, having been published this year (2008) and including substantial reflections motivated by recent progress in synthetic biology.

At 173 pages it is worth reading it yourself. And if you don

This is out of date now ( 1990 ) The net has made this kind of book not very useful anymore ( but it would have been in 90 )

My reactions upon reading this book in 1991.

Regis' fast-paced style has enough wit to make this book funny and lend just the right amount of incredulity and sarcasm. Many of the ideas of these supremely confidant, hubristic thinkers are not that new to an sf reader, even one who doesn't specifically search out these speculations or hard sf. About the only new ideas I heard were the engineering of suns and ways to beat the heat death and proton-decay of the universe. The rest -- cryonics, mind-machine transfers, artificial life, memes, nanotech, non-rocket space drives, space colonies, macro engineering -- I'd all been exposed to before, mostly in sf.

Indeed the link between sf and these ideas are strong. These scientists often are fans of sf, some even writers, of it. And most of these ideas were first proposed in sf and the attempt to realize them motivated by sf. Others have, as all outrageous scientific ideas do, motivated sf. L-5 space colonies are a prime example. Cryonics seems to have developed a postive feedback loop with sf. Of course, these ideas have a willing audience in sf circles. (Hans Moravecs ideas seem to be realized in detail in Philip C. Jennings who, while I have no conclusive proof, seems knowledgeable about Moravec.)

Regis manages to constantly shift his story from topic to topic, scientist to scientist, back and forth while making it completely clear. The book is obviously arranged from the hubris of escaping earth's gravitational well without governmental help (well, actually it starts with the hubris of Evel Knievel trying to jump the Snake River Canyon) to the hubris of trying to escape the death of the universe. Many of the characters are fascinating especially robochauvinist Hans Moravec, the man who would be computer. Moravec's schemes (and similar ones) are one of the few ideas I have trouble with. I have serious doubts (given the subtle interplays of chemistry, genetics, environment, and its seemingly chaotic organization) that the brain can be encoded in program form. And even it it could there's the frightening, to me, question: is the copy really you? I also had trouble with some of the examples of artificial life. Using the metaphor of life seems useful -- especially with memes, but I feel there should be some blob of matter associated with the life. Maybe I'm wrong.

Moravec wants to tamper with the stuff of humanity: the body, mind, and intellect. Is is silly to regret leaving the mortal coil ("putting away childish things" as Paul said) and its delights but terrible limitations and weaknesses Moravec is, in some sense, right in resenting the cravings of the body even though we find their satisfaction, well, satisfying. Why want to struggle to do things as a mere human? Will friendship, love survive the transformation. (And will, asks an old sf question, those "mind children" be lotus-eaters in a computer simulation? And will it matter if they do?). The "apocalyptic" (true in a religious sense, less so in a secular one) transformation of society is to be applauded and feared, ripe with fearful, resentful ambivalence in both visions.

How does a Great Mambo Chicken come about anyway? Well, some scientists were sitting around wandering what was so great about living in one-G conditions all the time. They made a big centrifuge, put some straw, chicken feed, and some chickens in there and spun them up to two-and-a-half Gs for months. The chickens did their chicken thing: they cackled, scratched around, laid eggs, and had grand chicken-ly times. Twenty-three generations went through this. They came out buff and muscled. Great Mambo Chickens. They had lost their excess fat, their hearts were pumping more blood, their extensor muscles were big, and their wingbeating exercises and treadmill tests showed a three-fold increase in strength. They strutted and stomped on the treadmills showing off their bad-self chickenness.

The human condition or the human predicament is not admired by many humans. Everybody wants to condemn it or improve it. Acceptance of it as is is considered feeble at best. Why is that? Religions emphasize the spiritual and denigrate the physical and the sordid thoughts that emanate from mushy brain tissue. Some come up with a formula that goes something like- have a salvation event, wear a hair shirt, fleece the poor, pray for the end-times to hurry up and get here, and then eternal paradise happens. The techno-nerds eliminate the faith part and decide they will create their own paradise by manipulating matter in all kinds of ways. Downloadable brains and personalities, back-up copies, exchangeable bodies of all kinds, cryogenic time-outs, and even more out-there ideas. The difference between the religionists and the techno-heaveners is one of faith and one of degrees of action. If the faith is expended in a nonactive delusion then not much happens in the present world. There are results if the faithful try to strong-arm their beliefs on others. Death comes and whatever happens on the other side of death happens. The other camp decides to manipulate the physical world in a effort to create their own visions of paradise in physical manifestations. The electronic self has to have a substrate to reside in.

Philosophy is hard enough to contemplate with humanity in the picture. Add transhumanism to mix and it's like trying to completely understand infinity. Vertigo ensues. Regis is a philosopher and the underlying theme of this book is hubris. Not a horror of hubris but an incredulous amazement of hubristic transhuman thinking in some circles. He uses italics extensively to bring across this incredulity. It's not a complicated read and many parts are entertaining. He is a philosopher with a sense of humor. The book was published twenty-one years ago. That makes for an interesting timeline about what has happened since. The robotics progress has been exponential since then.

I have a fondness for crazy people. Not psychopaths but crazy people that think really big crazy thoughts. This book is full of such characters. Some of them are actually dead now which probably messed up their goal of not dying. I'm not sure I want them to succeed with some of their grandiose plans for reshaping humanity and the universe but technology has a pattern of marching on bit by bit. Is it really a good idea to dismantle Jupiter? Or squeeze the sun to get some energy? It wasn't that long ago that many thought human flight was so hubristic that the gods would swoop down and knock humanity's wings off.

A true classic. Funny, enlightening, and one of the best stories about smart people you will ever read.

(posted on my blog: davenichols.net)

Philospher and popular science writer Ed Regis takes a modern look at the biological and philosophical nature of defining life in What is Life. While the subject matter is utterly fascinating, and at times this book is quite engaging, there were lots of problems with Regis's presentation.

Right off the bat, Regis sets up his story by detailing the work of researchers seeking to create artificial cells. The work itself is amazing and full of intriguing aspects. However, Regis somehow manages to drag the reader through this section with far-too clinical a look at the business and economic side of the work. While this sort of detail is appropriate in a larger, more comprehensive work, this was a large section of a book with less than 170 pages of actual text.

From there, a long stretch of science history is described, including Schrodinger, Watson, Crick, and others. Far too often for my taste, Regis quotes the brilliant but often highly-criticized Stephen Jay Gould. Gould's views on biology are frequently the subject of harsh criticism from his peers, and while that certainly does not make him incorrect, Regis fails to offer opposing views in situations where Gould's impressions are not necessarily so widely accepted. Regis does this in several other cases as well, in one instance offering a single sentence mentioning Richard Dawkins work, immediately following this by proclaiming that Dawkins's selfish gene theory "hardly settled the issue." Well of course it didn't settle the issue, but that's hardly the point.

Throughout the book, Regis asks us to think about what life is and how we might describe it. He hints early on that his conclusion centers on metabolism. Certainly a reasonable hypothesis, but only rarely does Regis offer actual support for this thesis. At one point, after describing the creation of a synthetic virus, he states: "That itself would have been an example of creating life ... except for the fact that a virus was not a living thing, but rather only a string of dead chemicals inside a protein coating." While that may be one way to describe a virus, this is a skewed interpretation based on Regis's theory that metabolism is absolutely required in a definition of life, a thesis that is not completely agreed upon by biologists or philosophers. Viruses in the wild do appear to have no life-like characteristics, but in vitro they are clearly performing many aspects of replication, mutation, and natural selection. It is hard to say a set of 'dead chemicals' can suddenly transform into something life-like without really explaining to the reader why this is so. Regis drops the ball and offers no explanation.

To be fair, parts of the book are enlightening and enjoyable, including later parts describing the modern work being done in the field of artificial life. But the narrative of history is mediocre, and the author's own philosophy often gets in the way of the story. Three stars.

Rather disappointing after the brilliant "Who Got Einstein's Office", perhaps because it is a collection of short pieces so lacks a cohesive focus. Entertaining nevertheless, but only periodically informative.

A very informative combined history of the CDC and case study of a particular outbreak of Ebola.½

Not that much longer than Erwin Schrödinger's famous little tract with the same title. On the vexed question of how to define life: "that which is capable of dying"? -- nah; "embodied metabolism"? -- maybe.

Not the most original book, but then again you might have guessed that from a book that repeats the title of a classic 60 year old book and has chapters that repeat the titles of some classic papers (e.g., The Spandrels of Saint Marco).

But it is a thoughtful, excellent, enjoyable, if occasionally journalist, overview of the title question. And most important it is completely up-to-date, having been published this year (2008) and including substantial reflections motivated by recent progress in synthetic biology.

At 173 pages it is worth reading it yourself. And if you don’t, the answer is metabolism.

Interesting and easy reading, although the writing is a tad smartassy at times.

Good. How the Institute was founded, who worked there, and their discoveries.

technolibertarians and the madcap extropian future were a lot more fun back in 1990