Literacy in Science

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Education

Literacy in Science

People, we are inaugurators and either disciplinarians, I would like just—we often integrate the analytic and the synthetic side, I would like to make those tool of sequencing and synthesis of DNA, something that is broadly integrated. So, if you get a personal genome, you should be able to get personal cell lines, stem cells derive from your adult tissues that allow you to bring together the synthetic biology and the sequencing so that you can repair parts of your body as you age or repair things that were inherited disorders.

I think that is actually those are both going very quickly as often happens in the exponential field.

I would like to see integration of better software, the computing aspect of these behind everything so that the average person can actually connect to the science. So, we went from a world where almost nobody do anything about computers to were where almost all of us are computer geeks for a huge fraction of our day. And I would like to see that happen with the digital world of a biological molecule too.

I would like to see better education, and I think this is one of the ways to get politician and regular folks excited about Science is most people are excited about themselves, personal geno mode of deliver for inexpensively something about Science, to which you can relate. Just like computers are becoming something to which you can relate but, it should be even easier to relate to your own biologic. And I hope that would be one of the ways we get the broader literacy in Science.

I think education is a barrier. If people do not understand what genetics is about, they are not going to adapt it. If they do not adapt it, then they won’t be funding both whether commercial or governmental to expand it. If they do not expand, there will be a self fulfilling prophecy that was not important, because it did not expand, we did not get it.

So I think that there is technological -- many technological hurdles, many as we said before opportunities for innovation, and so forth, but they have to connect the society in it. In my lab, we constantly asking, what is the utility of this pure science that we are doing?

Let us nudge it a little bit in a direction where people can connect to it and have some fun, and or help some very serious problems like that.