Artificial Lives: On the Occult Origins of Chemistry and the Stuff of Life | Hacker News Reader

Artificial Lives: On the Occult Origins of Chemistry and the Stuff of Life

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

67 pointsdrdee17 comments

This is a good place to mention "The Body Electric", by Robert Becker and Gary Selden.

https://bookshop.org/books/the-body-electric-electromagnetis...

Becker's lab was, for decades almost uniquely in the US, permitted to engage in research on effects of electromagnetic fields and currents on living systems.

I say "permitted" because it was career death to even mention it, most places. To this day, the official standards for exposure to E-M radiation admit possible effects only of heating, but Becker was able to profoundly alter growth and, crucially, regeneration patterns via sub-nanoamp electric currents.

I have no idea how or why the stricture was applied elsewhere, but Becker's free hand appears to have been a product of his employment by the US Veterans Administration, which would have liked for him to discover a way to regenerate veterans' and servicemen's severed limbs, so he did not depend on grants from the usual sources such as NSF and NIH, which must have kept a tight rein.

In 1987 I sneaked into a presentation at a conference in Szeged, Hungary, where an American biologist presented results of electromagnetically stimulating beetle larvae to grow 4x normal size. She remarked she had been unable to present such results at any US conference.

Fascinating...were there details on the adult beetle? Did it retain the "enhanced" size/live a normal life etc.?

I am lucky to remember this much 25 years later. That, and miles and miles of sunflowers between Budapest and Szeged.

I can recommend getting familiar with Michael Levin work also.

https://youtu.be/-Bwq1oOST7w

Thank you, this completely changed my conceptions of what it means to be human and to be alive. I will be sending this around to everybody.

Why do so many scientists tend to be utterly dogmatic when new research challenges their fundamental assumptions?

Their close mindedness terrifies me because they are increasingly relied on in decision making -- like vaccines, for example. I thought science is centered around an admission of infinite ignorance? At any moment we can be made aware of new information that completely changes our understanding of the world because the truth is not hardwired into us. They are more and more looking like a clergy caste for the post-God state.

As Max Planck said, science advances one funeral at a time. Each one had to wait for a previous generation to die to cement their own advance.

Incidentally, I remember young Kirkegaard writing that he didn't want to pursue science because each scientist is like a corpse that just fecundates the soil of science for the next generation--paraphrasing. That's why he went into the study of eternal things.

"...rather than considering life as an extraordinary phenomenon, miraculous and extraneous to all other behaviors of matter, chemistry provides us with the tools to think of life as one of the many different types of dynamic organization that matter can assume."

Nice work. Chemistry really is the most neglected of the popular-science topics. Most bookstores will have a large collection of pop-sci biology texts, and a large collection of pop-sci physics texts, and in between... much less, if anything. Complex materials, condensed matter, quantum properties of molecules, all are fundamentally important concepts in both nature and industry, and deserve a lot more attention.

I feel like eg Nile Red has made chemistry pretty popular recently.

Most of the immediately useful (to humans) chemistry are all organic based and electron-pushing doesn't exactly make for exciting reading. Sure everybody wants to re-enact Breaking Bad but learning the hundred or so heuristics of carbon compounds really takes a toll. Physical chemistry on the other hand is much more straightforward with tons of industrial applications but it doesn't offer much value by itself unless combined with some other process. Most industrial chemists will work on a small part of e.g. semiconductor manufacturing, the critical value creation is still done by somebody else.

Hi melony,

this is an interesting comment that carries some truth. May I ask where you are coming from to make to make these statements?

You are definitely right that one needs a larger, expensive capex based platform to make a dent with chemistry.

What combination of physical chemistry and *Umph/some other process would you look into?

No experience with high-level chemistry. Had training in both life science and software engineering. Standard premed science major chemistry experience. Business experience in chemical engineering fields

What sort of science vertical do you specialise in? Any links to your startup?

> What combination of physical chemistry and Umph/some other process would you look into?

I can't speak for chemistry but pre-COVID, "cloud laboratories" and "bioreactors-as-as-service" were really hot in the biotech field. I suppose something similar can be done for chemistry.

Lego mindstorms style kits for flow chemistry could also be interesting.

As for teaching chemistry, I am not sure how the process can be improved. I suppose focusing more on conceptual understanding rather than intuition would be helpful. The amount of knowledge that is needed as a foundation before you can do anything useful in organic chemistry is magnitudes greater than physical. If it can be googled in under a minute, don't expect students to memorize it. Physical is much more straightforward, learn the periodic table and be good at applied math and you are set. You can train chemical engineers as easily as web developers in a bootcamp (given the right STEM background). Good organic chemists are much trickier.

I'm a software engineer that works for a non-profit academic institute that's all about this stuff! I just do the software, not the history, but have a personal interest. But if you like this, some things from the org I work for that may interest you...

Here's a Google Arts & Culture online exhibit: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/0QIyP7XkB-WZLA

Some articles and podcasts: https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/early-science-a...

Some digitized manuscripts and such: https://digital.sciencehistory.org/focus/alchemy

> I'm a software engineer that works for a non-profit academic institute that's all about this stuff

That sounds awesome. You guys hiring?

Not at the moment, we pretty much have two software engineers on staff. And you might not like the salary if you compare it to for-profit world. But it is a nice place to work!

The most interesting discovery in this field was that experiment where by messing with magnetic field at the cellular level the growing worm suddenly got two heads. Chemistry seems to consider organisms as a lego constructor, and reduces magnetic field to a glue that binds lego pieces together.

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