All posts tagged: importance

CRISPR’s co-inventor on the importance of responsibility in science

CRISPR’s co-inventor on the importance of responsibility in science

Published by Jenni Sidey

Jennifer Doudna, biochemist and CRISPR co-inventor, walks through the technology’s biggest ethical flashpoints: the 2018 announcement of the first gene-edited babies, the use of gene drives to spread edited traits through wild populations like mosquitoes, and the growing (if overhyped) push to revive extinct species like the dire wolf. Doudna explains why she still feels a personal sense of responsibility for how CRISPR gets used, why the biotech field had a head start on safety compared to AI, and why the real question isn’t whether the technology works — it’s whether we’re moving at the right pace. This video CRISPR’s co-inventor on the importance of responsibility in science is featured on Big Think. Source link

The Importance of El Paso | Julia Preston

The Importance of El Paso | Julia Preston

Published by Jenni Sidey

El Paso sits in a verdant opening between arid mountains at the westernmost tip of Texas, at a place where the Rio Grande often runs shallow enough to wade across from Ciudad Juárez, its twin city in Mexico. Since the lands north of the river were taken over by the United States in 1848 as the spoils of the Mexican-American War, the pass has been a crossing point, in both directions, for Mexican immigrants, laborers, and traders; for soldiers and smugglers, politicos and revolutionaries; for cowboys, Native people, Black people; for families bifurcated by the boundary. The journalist Jazmine Ulloa grew up in the city, and in the course of her work over the past decade she came to feel that her hometown had been wrongly marginalized in the story Americans tell about the origins and development of their country. In El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, she sets out to restore the city “to its rightful position” as a place of entry and connection as consequential …

The Importance of an Ordinary Day

The Importance of an Ordinary Day

Published by Jenni Sidey

When students, or professionals, sit down across from me for what I call a “Flourishing Chat,” which is a mix between life, professional, and health coaching, they rarely begin with a crisis. More often they say something like, “I know what I want to do… I just don’t feel that great about it.” They describe futures that sound impressive: consulting, medicine, law, leadership roles at major companies. The plans are polished. The résumés are strong. From the outside, everything looks ready to go. Then I ask a different question: “What would your ordinary Tuesday look like at this job?” I don’t want to know about the title on their business cards or their starting salary. I want them to tell me what time they’ll wake up, who they will spend their days with, what kinds of problems they will solve, what their evenings feel like when they come home tired. At this point in the conversation, every time, students, and sometimes even professionals, can’t answer my questions. The conversation turns into silence. They have thought …