Video from The Economist's World in 2010 Festival

The Economist has posted video from the World in 2010 Festival, held in Washington DC in early December.  The Innovation panel is below, with me (Biodesic), Dean Kamen (DEKA Research), Dwayne Spradlin (Innocentive), and Kai Huang (Guitar Hero), moderated by Mathew Bishop (The Economist).  (Here is a link to video selections from the rest of the event.)  I was chatting with a reporter a few days ago who observed that everyone else on the panel is quite wealthy -- hopefully that bodes well for me in 2010.  But maybe I am destined always to be the odd man out.  C-Span is re-running the video periodically on cable if you want to watch it on a bigger screen, but I can't seem to find an actual schedule.  (Here is their web version: Innovation in 2010.)


I have a couple of general thoughts about the event, colored by another meeting full of economists, bankers, and traders that I attended in the last week of December.  I met a number of fantastically accomplished and interesting people in just a few hours, many of whom I hope will remain lifelong friends. 

First, I have to extend my thanks to The Economist -- they have been very good to me over the last 10 years, beginning in 2000 by co-sponsoring (with Shell) the inaugural World in 2050 writing competition.  (Here is my essay from the competition (PDF).  It seems to be holding up pretty well, these 10 years later, save the part about building a heart.  But at least I wasn't the only one who got that wrong.)

Here is a paraphrased conversation over drinks between myself and Daniel Franklin, the Executive Editor of the newspaper.

Me:  I wanted to thank you for including me.  The Economist has been very kind to me over the past decade.
Franklin: Well, keep doing interesting things.
Me:  Umm, right.  (And then to myself: Shit, I have a lot of work to do.)

On to the World in 2010 Festival.  The professional economists and journalists present all seem to agree that we have seen the worst of the downturn, that the stimulus package clipped the bottom off of whatever we were falling into, and that employment gains going forward could be a long time in coming.  Unsurprisingly, the Democratic politicians and operatives who turned up crowed about the effects of the stimulus, while the Republicans who spoke poo-pooed any potential bright spots in, well, just about everything.

At the other meeting I attended, last week in Charleston, SC, one panel of 10 people, composed Federal reserve and private bankers, traders, and journalists couldn't agree on anything.  The recovery would be V shaped.  No, no, W shaped.  No, no, no, reverse square root shaped (which was the consensus at The World in 2010 Festival).  No, no, no, no, L shaped.  But even those who agreed on the shape did not agree on anything else, such as the availability of credit, employment, etc.

Basically, as far as I can tell, nobody has the slightest idea what the future of the US economy looks like.  And I certainly don't have anything to add to that.  Except, of course, that the future is biology.

Here is John Oliver's opening monologue from the Festival.  He was absolutely hilarious.  Unfortunately you can't hear the audience cracking up continuously.  I nearly pissed myself.  Several times.  (Maybe the cocktails earlier in the evening contributed to both reactions.)

Back to Innovation in 2010.  Dean Kamen had this nice bit in response to a question about whether the imperative to invent and innovate has increased in recent years (see 36:20 in the C-Span video): "7 billion people can't be recipients, they have to be part of the solution.  And that is going to require advanced technologies to be properly developed and properly deployed more rapidly than ever before."

To this I can only add that we are now seeing more power to innovate put into the hands of individuals than has ever occurred in the history of humanity.  Let's hope we don't screw up.

Quote of the Day

The semi-ancient electrophoresis power goes on the fritz, so of course we open it up to see what's what.  Lot's of discrete logic, some massive (1 milli Farad each!) capacitors, a couple of Motorola 68000s.  Nothing obviously amiss, and no hope of figuring out what has gone wrong.

But we did get this gem: "Oh, that's where the beeping noise comes from."  That's what makes it all worthwhile.

In the News

The December issue of Nature Biotechnology contains a special focus section on synthetic biology.  Here is my commentary, "The Changing Economics of DNA Synthesis".  The PDF version appears to be available for free, at least for the moment.

My interview in the Fall 2009 issue of GBN:bulletin is now available from the Global Business Network.  The issue also contains a short interview with Stewart Brand about his new book -- it is well worth reading.

Revisiting Mood Hacking with Scents

Following on my post last spring about mood hacking, October brought more hints that behavior can be explicitly modified using scents.  A variety of news outlets picked up on a press release from BYU describing a forthcoming paper in Psychological Science that demonstrates, "that clean scents not only motivate clean behavior, but also promote virtuous behavior by increasing the tendency to reciprocate trust and to offer charitable help."  Here I am quoting from a pre-print, entitled "The Smell of Virtue", cached at the University of Toronto.  The paper describes two experiments in which citrus-scented window cleaner appeared to alter behavior.  I have to say that I found the references to Proust, saints, sinners god, and cleanliness (all that in 4 pages!) to be distractions from the main ideas, not to mention the data.

Here is the ScienceDaily reporting, and here is Time's take.

(Not everyone is happy with the methodology described in the paper, the conclusions, and the way it was written.)

What makes this interesting (to me) is that the researchers don't necessarily imply a direct biological mechanism.  The induced behavior may simply be the result of a learned association.  That is, there is no suggestion that anything about the scent that serves to flip a biological switch that leads to different behavior.  Rather the lead author, Katie Liljenquist of BYU, and her colleagues had  previously demonstrated a link between transgression and a desire for cleanliness (see "Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing", Science, 313(5792), 2006).  "Out, damned spots!" and all that.

The citrus scent may simply something that Prof. Liljenquist's test subjects (probably undergraduates at US universities) have learned to associate with cleanliness.  Would students at Asian universities have the same response to the same scent?  I suppose one way to quickly address this question is to see what sort of scents Asians prefer in their window cleaners.  Here is my point: even though there may be no innate molecular pathway exploited in this "behavior reprogramming", it may still be possible to exploit culturally defined (or perhaps "contextually constructed") neural pathways (from the receptors to the brain) for the purpose of mood hacking.

I am not particularly excited about the possibility of having my own mood hacked without my knowledge.  That this might be accomplished even in the absence of genetically identifiable response pathway should give one pause.  Any molecular pathway responsible for this effect (should it prove reproducible and engineerable) is unlikely to be well understood for many years to come.  But if the results from the citrus-scent study are to be believed, then it is already possible to manipulate behavior using scents, even though we have little idea how to defend against it other than by using more scents.  Perfume warfare.  Lovely.

Can't wait until the iGEM undergraduates get a hold of this.  They have already built bugs that smell like bananas and mint.  When will they start trying to influence the judges' decisions directly using synthetic scent pathways?

US Market Value of GM Crops is Approximately $70 Billion

I have a short letter in the November 2009 issue of Nature Biotechnology (subscription req.) correcting the record on US revenues from genetically modified crops.  Based on USDA data for corn, soy, and cotton, revenues from the GM versions of those crops were about US$ 65 billion in 2008, rather than the widely misreported ~$4 billion.  The latter figure is in fact just from GM seed revenue.  I would put the total from all GM crops and seeds at $75-85 billion, though it isn't yet clear where GM sugar beets are going to come in.  Assuming US revenues are representative of global averages, thentotal worldwide revenues are probably north of $150 billion for crops and seeds together.

Below is a figure showing US yearly revenues from the three big crops, as well as the US annual total.  Note that although the GM fraction of each crop continues to grow (see the ISAAA report from 2008), prices fluctuate sufficiently from year to year that total revenues declined from 2007 to 2008.  Food and crop prices have come off their 2007 highs -- which cannot last given increasing demand around the world.  I would expect revenues to resume their climb in 2010.

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