Friends who know me well would probably say that I'm a tech-guy. That I enjoy being competent with the use of advanced technologies. They'd be right. As the son of an engineer, it was important in our household for all of us siblings to be good with tools, to understand how technology can be applied. I proceeded from mechanics, to electronics, to science, to computers and now am immersed in the fields of digital health and Ai. Seeing the many revolutions in my life, from space craft, to computers, to mobile phones, satellites and advanced medicine, it would be easy for me to draw the conclusion that these developments revolutionising our world have come about by building upon advances in technology, most particularly computing technology. But that's not the full story - not by a long way.
In this blog, I'd like to share some revolutionary insights and capabilities that could have happened many years or decades earlier - i.e. the limiting factor was the gaining the insight, not in developing a threshold technology or leveraging advanced computing capabilities. Then I'm going to ask - can we accelerate the pace of gaining new insights, that may be independent of the pace of technology maturation?
Let's begin with one innovation that is close to my heart. CRISPR (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) has revolutionised the way we can manipulate and even engineer DNA. CRISPR can make precise genetic alterations in diverse cell types and organisms, including mice, plants, fish, and human cells. The Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna who were inspired by the bacterial immune system that uses an enzyme called Cas9 to cut up the genes of invading viruses, which are stored by the bacteria to aid in warding off future invasions. The two scientists began thinking about how they could rework this viral defence system into an easily programmable gene-editing tool. They synthesized a new molecule, called the single-guide RNA, which combines key features of the two bacterial RNAs and directs Cas9 to cut a specific site in DNA (Science 2012, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1225829 ) . CRISPR can be used to generate animal models of disease by knocking down or targeting a gene of interest. CRISPR can also be used to generate cell lines that contain disease-causing mutations and can be used to study the molecular mechanisms of the disease. See: https://biologydictionary.net/crispr/ The fascinating thing to me is that CRISPR does not depend on a room full of computers and the technology itself could have been discovered and implemented years earlier.
Many concepts in science are like this: consider the insights of Louis Pasteur (e.g. the discovery that the spoiling of food was dependent on pathogens in the air which came to be known as the "germ theory") that were often so simple in terms of technology they could have been done decades or even centuries earlier (and are now often reproduced by high school students with simple glassware). Similarly, he painstakingly sorted crystals into two different piles depending on their shape (as observed by him under a microscope) and once dissolved in water found they polarised light in different rotations, leading to a revolution in understanding of chemical structures. In another example, the splitting of light into different colours by a prism had been observed by many people over the centuries, but it took the insight of Newton to recombine the split light back together with another prism to once more produce white light that lead to a revolution in our understanding of light.
Can we accelerate the pace of gaining new insights, independently of the pace of technology maturation?
When we are trying to advance science, it's often tempting to think about the role of high technology, of future quantum computers, of DNA synthesising robots etc, but I'd like to make a case instead for more "white space" i.e. the freedom for people to be creative, to interact with colleagues from different fields of endeavour, across arts and sciences to stimulate idea and innovation generation. This white space is hard to achieve in a grant-dominated world of "directed research" where outputs are required to be directly tied to funding. In my career journey I have observed that many times the best insights have come about NOT in this directed research manner, but when people have conversations with peers from other disciplines, and from other countries, when ideas flow, when the institutes promote at least some spare time for play and creative endeavours to encourage fertile thinking.
I'm pleased that my early career at the #WEHI allowed me to directly observe the benefits of such fostered cross-discipline collaboration, but I fear we tend to migrate over time to more narrow and directed funding pathways in corporations and research organisations. #philanthropy is important in allowing for some funded "white space", but beyond this, I believe we can all encourage idea and innovation generation by sharing thoughts, encouraging broad-minded discussions, with diverse stakeholders and by being optimistic being open to new ideas. We can also encourage and support broader longer-term research efforts that are not so restrictively tied to specific outcomes and encourage the sharing of insights which can come from any field and anywhere so that we can take advantage of serendipity when it occurs. Louis Pasteur (in my view one of the most amazing innovators and discoverers of all time) said "Chance favours the prepared mind". My interpretation is that we must lay the groundwork in our lives for innovation and idea generation and to be prepared for the careful observation, hard work and thinking that is always required. Pasteur showed his approach was reproducible since he made major breakthroughs in different fields in through his life.
We do not know where the next breakthrough will come from, where the next huge leap may emerge, but please, let us NOT think that it is down to only a select handful of people working in national high technology laboratories. Let's encourage more broad knowledge sharing across disciplines, and encourage the optimism and community engagement that will surely generate insights that do not depend on "mega scale" technologies. And please let us work to inspire the upcoming generations to enjoy the process of gaining insights through the pleasure of learning so that education is not merely the repetition of dry facts and an experience to be suffered.
Thomas Watson (of early IBM fame) coined the word THINK as the early IBM company slogan. That's great - but I don't believe it's enough. We also need careful unbiased observation (like Pasteur, Newton, Doudner and Charpentier showed). And we need broad idea sharing and, yes, also to think - in the white space we have hopefully been able to find. Perhaps the order doesn't matter - you need all three in different times. So I'd like to end with a new proposition for generating more insights:
OBSERVE, THINK, SHARE
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