Root Privileges

Tag: George Church

  • When we play god with dogs and the climate

    When we play god with dogs and the climate

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    Accusing people of ‘hubris’ and of “playing god” vis-à-vis solutions to the canine crisis and the climate crisis isn’t just pointless but may betray a preference for a moral position that is no longer gainful. Once “man” has “played god”, every action that follows – however humble or selfless – can be said to be…

  • Let’s release more carbon and then store it

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    Would you look at this hypocrisy. George Church’s startup Colossal recently raised $15 million towards his longer-term effort to revive woolly mammoths – at least, he wants to splice woolly-mammoth genes with those of an Asian elephant to create a ‘mammophant’ – to bring back the Pleistocene-era ‘mammoth steppe’, a landscape he hopes will preserve…

  • Forget mammoths, protect elephants

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    From ‘Scientists Say They Could Bring Back Woolly Mammoths. But Maybe They Shouldn’t’, published by NPR on September 14, 2021: Flush with a $15 million infusion of funding, Harvard University genetics professor George Church, known for his pioneering work in genome sequencing and gene splicing, hopes the company, in the bold words of its news…

  • Woolly mammoths and a quasi-techbro

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    I wrote for The Wire Science about George Church’s idea to repopulate the Arctic tundra with woolly mammoths to, among other things, help maintain the permafrost. He isn’t the first person to think of this – that dubious distinction belongs to, and Church himself got it from, Sergey Zimov, whose ‘Pleistocene Park’ in northeast Russia…

  • Melinda, Bill and Jeffrey (Epstein)

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    I’m not sure what to make of Bill Gates as he features in the New York Times‘s report on his divorce with Melinda French Gates, although it’s tempting to see hints of that attitude so often on display when the Jeffrey Epstein scandal broke in 2019: “I had to have known of the sort of…

  • Another exit from MIT Media Lab

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    J. Nathan Matias, a newly minted faculty member at Cornell University and a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, has announced that he will cut all ties with the latter at the end of the academic year over the lab director’s, i.e. Joi Ito’s, association with Jeffrey Epstein. His announcement comes on the heels…

  • Joi Ito’s nerd tunnel vision

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    On August 15, Joi Ito, the director of MIT’s famed Media Lab, published a post apologising for fraternising with Jeffrey Epstein. His wording mimics a bit of George Church’s as well, in that Ito says he “was never involved in, never heard him talk about, and never saw any evidence of the horrific acts that…