The Code Breaker

Darwin and Wallace had a key trait that is a catalyst for creativity: they had wide-ranging interests and were able to make connections between different disciplines.

Two revolutions coincided in the 1950s. Mathematicians, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, showed that all information could be encoded by binary digits, known as bits. This led to a digital revolution powered by circuits with on-off switches that processed information. Simultaneously, Watson and Crick discovered how instructions for building every cell in every form of life were encoded by the four-letter sequences of DNA. Thus was born an information age based on digital coding (0100110111001…) and genetic coding (ACTGGTAGATTACA…).

Szostak had a guiding principle: Never do something that a thousand other people are doing.

As we humans struggle to fight off novel strains of viruses, it’s useful to note that bacteria have been doing this for about three billion years, give or take a few million centuries.

Don’t fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach.

Vaccinations were pioneered in the 1790s by an English doctor named Edward Jenner who noticed that many milkmaids were immune to smallpox. They had all been infected by a form of pox that afflicts cows but is harmless to humans, and Jenner surmised that the cowpox had given the milkmaids immunity to smallpox. So he took some pus from a cowpox blister, rubbed it into scratches he made in the arm of his gardener’s eight-year-old son, and then (this was in the days before bioethics panels) exposed the kid to smallpox. He didn’t become ill.