by Andrew Maynard | Oct 26, 2008 | Civic Science, Policy
With just over a week to go before the 2008 US presidential election, there’s no shortage of opinions floating around on the key science and technology-related challenges facing an incoming Obama or McCain administration. But while advice swirls around issues like...
by Andrew Maynard | Oct 10, 2008 | Civic Science, Synthetic Biology
Sitting here absorbing the atmosphere at the Synthetic Biology 4.0 meeting in Hong Kong, I have the strangest feeling of being transported into a Kim Stanley Robinson novel. It’s not the cutting edge science being presented that is responsible, exciting and...
by Andrew Maynard | Sep 24, 2008 | Civic Science, Policy
Forget the economy, healthcare, the war in Iraq. For some, the next President of the United States will need to rise to a far higher bar: Is he an e-mail junkie, or still stuck on snail mail? John McCain’s lack of e-mail-savvy was the butt of recent...
by Andrew Maynard | Jun 13, 2008 | Civic Science, Engagement, Synthetic Biology
Read Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat” or Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”, and you get a glimpse into how the hacker culture that emerged at the tail end of the twentieth century revolutionized the digital world. Will a confluence of emerging...
by Andrew Maynard | Mar 19, 2008 | Civic Science, Communication, Engagement, Nanotechnology
On March 18th, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died in his home in Sri Lanka at the age of 90. A master developer and assembler of ideas, Clarke will be remembered fondly by many for igniting their enthusiasm for science, and how it might be used to...
by Andrew Maynard | Dec 8, 2007 | Civic Science, Nanotechnology, Policy
A trip through the newly refurbished St. Pancras station in London this week, and home to the widely-proclaimed “longest champagne bar in Europe”, prompted the following thought: At the champagne bar of modern science, are risk researchers the cappuccino drinkers...
