Technology is Preserving Our Ghosts

Our technology is giving us progressively greater power to keep alive our ancestors' ghosts. First the invention of writing allowed us to preserve their words. Painting and photography allowed us to preserve their faces. The phonograph preserves their voices and the videotape recorder preserves their movement and gestures. But this is only the beginning. Soon we shall acquire the technology to preserve a permanent record of the sequence of bases in the DNA of their cells. This means that we s...

 Darwin and the Origins of Life

There is a curious parallelism between Darwin's twenty-year delay in publishing his theory of evolution and Newton's {102} twenty-year delay in publishing the Principia. And Newton's refusal to publish his cosmological speculations finds a parallel in Darwin's silence concerning the problem of the origin of life. If we are to understand in general terms the place of life in the universe, we must also understand life's origin. Darwin explicitly excluded the origin of life from the scope of ...

 Science Unifiers

Now it is generally true that the very greatest scientists in each discipline are unifiers. This is especially true in physics. Newton and Einstein were supreme as unifiers. The great triumphs of physics have been triumphs of unification. We almost take it for granted that the road of progress in physics will be a wider and wider unification bringing more and more phenomena within the scope of a few fundamental principles. Einstein was so confident of the correctness of this road of unificati...

 An Early Experiment Hinting at DNA

Anomaly (2) was observed by Fred Griffith, decades before DNA and the genetic code. He found that if you inject a heat-treated, dead, virulent species of bacteria (pneumococcus S) into a rat previously infected with a nonvirulent species (pneumococcus R), then species R became transformed into species S, thereby killing the rat. About fifteen years later, Oswald Avery found that you can even do this in a test tube; dead S would transform live R into live S if the two were simply incubated tog...