The Market of the World's Poor

♠
The Times has an interesting little piece on inventions and design to improve the social welfare of the world's poorest people:

The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis.

“We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.

Reversing that ratio is perhaps Utopian, but he shows how it can be improved.


(Source: Donald G. McNeil Jr. for The New York Times)

xXx

The Market of the World's Poor

♠
The Times has an interesting little piece on inventions and design to improve the social welfare of the world's poorest people:

The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis.

“We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.

Reversing that ratio is perhaps Utopian, but he shows how it can be improved.


(Source: Donald G. McNeil Jr. for The New York Times)

xXx

Synthetic Biology: To Become Frankenstein

♠
That brave new world keeps looking braver and nearer. Looking to treat biology like another kind of manufacturing, scientists are hoping to create living organisms that can do almost anything from solving our energy problems to curing cancer:

Scientists in the last couple of years have been trying to create novel forms of life from scratch. They've forged chemicals into synthetic DNA, the DNA into genes, genes into genomes, and built the molecular machinery of completely new organisms in the lab—organisms that are nothing like anything nature has produced.

... Despite the opposition, the researchers who work in the field, which is known as Synthetic Biology, have a disarming casualness about their work—almost as though they were building machines, rather than living things.

Naturally, there is controversy over the religious implications, over and beyond whether this new science will even succeed, about the sacredness of life and people playing God. All that good stuff. The excerpt containing that discussion is below.


( excerpt )

(Source: Lee Silver for Newsweek)

xXx

Synthetic Biology: To Become Frankenstein

♠
That brave new world keeps looking braver and nearer. Looking to treat biology like another kind of manufacturing, scientists are hoping to create living organisms that can do almost anything from solving our energy problems to curing cancer:

Scientists in the last couple of years have been trying to create novel forms of life from scratch. They've forged chemicals into synthetic DNA, the DNA into genes, genes into genomes, and built the molecular machinery of completely new organisms in the lab—organisms that are nothing like anything nature has produced.

... Despite the opposition, the researchers who work in the field, which is known as Synthetic Biology, have a disarming casualness about their work—almost as though they were building machines, rather than living things.

Naturally, there is controversy over the religious implications, over and beyond whether this new science will even succeed, about the sacredness of life and people playing God. All that good stuff. The excerpt containing that discussion is below.


( excerpt )

(Source: Lee Silver for Newsweek)

xXx