Extra Crispy
Free power, Gene Wilder, and Creation
My subtitle promises a lot and I expect to deliver! A while back, I found myself, “just like everyone else” thinking about the new year. What will seem relevant around November 2023 versus what captures our short-term fancy right now? We are surrounded by change and I believe we are prone to whatever captures our senses. I guess this is why advertising can be so compelling. To write today’s post, I tried to clear my mind of all the neat things I may have heard about recently and decided instead to focus on what might overwhelm me with surprise. After doing a bit of scouring the internet and writing this post, my advice for all of us is to buckle up! I am so much more confident that amazing things will come to pass. My previous post (all about CRISPR) was in fact titled Buckle Up.
2023 Will NOT Be
The year of something inane from Tik-Tok or Instagram
The year of AI-generated term papers
The year the robots take over.
The year when synthetic meat makes me forget about a nice T-Bone.
The year when Elon Musk gives up his Twitter addiction.
The year when the nuclear fusion illusion as a power source moves closer to reality.
Items In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Today I will talk about hockey sticks at times and it won’t be a crazy tangent. My topic today has been ready to explode on the scene for decades. It has been chugging along on the flat of the hockey stick and is starting to rise up toward the handle. This is what finally becomes recognizable as exponential growth. The hard, basic and largely anonymous work has been going on for over thirty years. A while back I read a rather satisfying explanation of why some things change quickly and other things seem not to change at all. Someone who must have been interested in the same thing and a lot smarter than me coined the great phrase “a learning curve”. So what is a learning curve and why don’t we use it for all sorts of things? More importantly, why should anyone care about learning curves at all? One of the great benefits of a learning curve is the things we presumably need and want can be continuously made at lower cost and better performance! I can think of a couple of things that are NOT on a learning curve to explain my point.
Humankind Becomes A Creator
Humanity has always wrestled with what life is, from whence it came, and the boundaries of who is in charge.
It is not surprising we argue about it.
It is not surprising that many of us embrace the thinking that creation is not the domain of humankind.
Our scientific march has been bringing us to this day for a long time. We learned to cross-breed plants starting largely with Native Americans and corn. We’ve managed and optimized the breeding of animals we enjoy like horses, cats, and dogs. We now actively optimize the animals we eat.
All of the above actions come down to gene editing by another name.
I believe this is the year when gene editing grows up and leaves the nest.
All of this finally brings humankind to the very brink of creation. While we have always been able to rationalize that creating a cocker spaniel, refining corn seed so we can grow it 8” apart, or building a chicken we can take from hatchling to chicken nuggets in five weeks are great achievements but “not really” creation. CRISPR which I wrote about extensively previously when I profiled the CREATION of a human-compatible heart in a pig can no longer be denied as anything other than creation in every sense of the word.
Literature like Mary Shelley and Frankenstein has captured our imagination for a long time. I think the very best interpretation of Shelley will always belong to Mel Brooks in the able hands and acting talent of Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman.
Cool Your Jets
One of the advantages of age is hopefully a bit of wisdom through the school of hard knocks if you pay attention along the way. Most innovations of human history were a slog of trial and error. VERY FEW innovations we enjoy today had the benefit of being on a learning curve. My last post of 2022 was about resolutions and my doubts regarding their efficacy. My sense is whatever is being hyped the heaviest is probably the most overrated stuff and will sink into the background. Knowing that solar energy has DROPPED in price 89% in the last ten years assures me that its impact on our lives is worth watching. There are tons of things that are not. Lets have a little fun.
A while back I had a blast writing about silly kitchen gadgets. I think it is safe to say there haven’t been that many cases of steady improvement. I’m not sure refrigerators or ranges are much different than they were thirty years ago. I suppose the microwave was a pretty cool breakthrough but I don’t think they steadily improve. Here’s the post I did about kitchen gadgets. I think it was a lot of fun for many readers. I received a lot of messages outside of the comments from people not willing to share their own weird gadgets with the whole world. If you are willing to share about ludicrous kitchen gadgets drop a note in the comments. Extra credit for photos.
Canned food was trailblazed by Napoleon-era France. A newfangled way to preserve things. It did not take long to STANDARDIZE the features of a can and of course was accompanied by a can opener. Can openers probably haven’t changed very much as a result and there is probably no need for a learning curve? They are all pretty much the same. Two spur gears, one to guide the feed wheel and one to guide the cutting wheel. A few turns of the wrist and the hermetically sealed can top has been severed. I know there are electric versions but really how often do we open cans? Much like other “must-have” accessories in our lives (phones for example), if you want to make more money, you just “polish the apple” and tweak some small aspect of the can opener and some demographic will gladly pay you lots more for the right brand or cachet. No learning curve required — CHECK.
The Learning Curve
We all take for granted the magical behavior in our economy of certain things. Some things just continuously get better. While they still might do “the same basic thing”, they drop in price and increase in function without pause. A decent example is a solar cell or panel. I think most of us don’t understand what is happening and how they work. I am far from an expert but understand the basics. All we know is if the sun shines on them, somehow, we end up getting energy for free from the mere act of the sun shining!
It is estimated that sometime around the 7th century BCE, a magnifying glass became the means to light fires and burn ants. The photovoltaic (PV) cell was invented in 1954. While it existed in the laboratory, a handful of Bell Labs researchers made the first practical device on silicon. That first PV was about 4% efficient. Soon thereafter as earth satellites became a thing, generating power in space was a perfect application.
By 1958, the PVs were about 10% efficient. An early satellite was capable of producing about 1 watt of electricity (most of us can buy 1000 watts (kilowatts) for an hour for about 15 cents when we pay our electric bills. Bell Labs launches the first telecommunication satellite in 1962 and they are generating 14 watts of electricity! By 1966, NASA launches an observatory that can generate 1000 watts of electricity. Even though this is a very small amount of energy, it is growing RAPIDLY. How long can this growth keep up? The answer — LEARNING CURVES!
What’s a Learning Curve?
While we honor the first person lighting fires with a magnifying glass as well as those Bell Labs fellas, they don’t have much to do with each other. The term exponential growth has become part of our modern lexicon but what is it exactly? It is undoubtedly true that solar energy has been growing “exponentially”. In fact, the secret of learning curves is kinda cool. Unlike a can opener, we are talking about things that new breakthroughs in fundamental science can allow us to do things DIFFERENTLY. Solar energy just happens to be one of those things based upon the continuing miniaturizing of silicon circuitry. Each time we make things smaller, the distance to travel from the cell to the collector gets smaller and more efficient! Once we bump up against “that is as small as I can make it”, we go back to the drawing board and think up a new novel way to go even smaller. So rather than optimizing the same can opener, we are reinventing the can opener over and over with a new method. For those interested in finance and investment, the nirvana for growth is the hockey stick. Start slow and then rocket up steadily. It is interesting that products that produce that type of growth are often a pile of inverted hockey sticks so that growth and efficiency can continue for the long-term.
A learning curve means something like:
Let’s start making photovoltaics in 1954
Someone gets an idea in 1956 and we exploit it till it cannot improve anymore and that idea runs out of steam. A way to show running out of steam is to think of an upside-down (inverted) hockey stick. The improvement is steep but eventually levels out!!!
Time for ANOTHER idea! So what REALLY is happening with faster and cheaper computers or better solar energy is not one chart at all. It is a bunch of upside-down hockey sticks stacked on top of each other. As long as we keep thinking of ways to improve and make them, the overall trend will be ever upward. Things like computers and solar cells are special and not like can openers. Their TRUE limitation is how small we can make the roadways for atomic particles to move versus making a cheaper can opener.
Each time we think this stuff can’t keep getting faster, more efficient, cheaper, human ingenuity surprises us. Kinda cool.
The U.S. installed 4.6 gigawatts (GWdc) of solar PV capacity in Q3 2022 to reach 135.7 GWdc of total installed capacity, enough to power 24 million American homes. Solar has accounted for 45% of all new electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. through the first three quarters of the year. That’s enough for 4.6 billion of those first satellites from 1958
What Else Is Rising Unabated?
Of all the things I wrote about in the last year or so, nothing seems more earth-shaking than CRISPR (extra crispy ROFL). Humans have spent so much of their lives considering where we came from and what is creation at its root. I believe this set of new facts has been with us for awhile. Our awareness has now been focused as we are no longer talking about creating a new stalk of corn. Starting with an Augustinian friar, Gregory Mendel who focused on pea plants. His work was largely ignored until its “rediscovery” in 1900. What firmed up in the intervening 34 years was the realization that living things INHERIT their traits from the previous generation. How this was accomplished remained a mystery until Crick and Watson (with help) revealed the secret decoder ring of ALL LIFE, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
Our recent challenge of the novel Corona Virus introduced us to the magical breakthrough in vaccines and a related structure mRNA. Messenger RNA is hard for me to understand. My method of explaining it comfortably is to think of mRNA as the directions/recipe for making stuff. The wonders we have learned in the last 75 years are that living things have PERFECTED the making of stuff virtually without error. A manufacturing engineer would dream about matching what nature does all the time in all its glory. Nature has developed processes to evaluate the stuff we make, recognize the bad copies, and purge them. While it is not perfect, mutations, ie. bad copies are very rare. It is the wonder of life. For me, taking a step back and becoming aware that the lowliest bacteria, a California Redwood, and human beings ALL LARGELY DO THE VERY SAME THING. These insights bring humanity to the very brink of understanding and now intervening in creation!
As amazing as the diversity of living things that have emerged on our planet, it seems there are only a handful of operations necessary to make it all happen. The operations include
We need recipes of stuff we require to live. We have found and figured this out.
We need to know how to take the recipe and turn it into the steps to make something. This is what mRNA does. We have figured this out.
When we work in the kitchen there is the preparation process, the cooking and the cleanup. The cleanup process is part of what studying bacteria has taught us. We’ve figured out how to observe cleanup and now have built tools to do it.
When we make something in the kitchen, assembling the ingredients is a thing. Our bodies, it turns out have a way to find and retrieve the garlic we need for the recipe. It turns out CRISPR has revealed a way to provide our bodies with a sample of what we are looking for and go find it. This is basically sharing what something looks like and our cells do the rest. This is sort of how the immune system can work. Once our body secures the formula of the bad stuff it can send out search crews to find it.
If each time we found an ingredient to make something but lacked hands to bring it to the prep area, that would be a drag. CRISPR has also taught us not only how to seek out what we are looking for. Once we find it, it cuts it out and brings it where it is needed! It does this by finding the ingredient, cutting it out and loading it in the trunk. This is sort of analogous to CUT and COPY in a word processor.
CRISPR is best described as the tools we need to look for stuff, when we find it, the means to cut it out, modify part of it, remove part of it or add something to it. If you can find, add, modify, delete and remove you have ALL THE OPERATIONS to make whatever you want! We have figured out how to do this! 2023 will be the year where we start drastically improving on creation, and correcting even the small errors nature has made all along!!! correcting the fallibility in DNA replication we call mutation. A lot of amazing diseases are in the bullseye and this will be the year.
What Can We Change?
Human trials are underway. I think it is likely that the following will be CURED in clinical trials this year. The dominoes that fall will be one gene diseases as it is likely that fixing the one defect will ameliorate the disease:
Sickle cell anemia — The treatment involves CRISPR entering the cell to mimic a rare deletion in the genome that blocks the genetic 'off switch' for foetal haemoglobin, allowing it to be produced again. After being returned to the bone marrow, these stem cells begin to make normal red blood cells, now with foetal haemoglobin. Ending a disease with one genetic cut will resemble the absurd human effort to eliminate smallpox. The 175-year effort against smallpox will be reduced to turning off a single genetic switch. The amazing thing about CRISPR is we finally have come to understand how we work and will soon be able to turn things on, turn things off or change things including the errors and limitations natural evolution has not found the path to reparation. No transplants, no surgeries, just an edit of a gene, and our bodies will do the rest, no fuss, no muss. About 100,000 people in the US have sickle cell anemia. It is estimated that another 300,000 are born with the condition worldwide every year. Most do not make it to their 5th birthday.
Muscular Dystrophy — For those of you that remember the Jerry Lewis telethon for so many years focused on MD, here is some amazing and hopeful development. Using CRISPR, scientists have CURED MD in mice. Human trials are in progress. I would surmise we will hear exaggerated reporting by the end of the year but some MD cases will be cured by CRISPR as the year progresses. Optimizing the approach will take longer but I believe this disease is in the crosshairs. MD occurs in about 3.6 out of every 100,000 people. This works out to 300,000 people whose lives can be redirected away from this misery. Amazing.
If sickle cell anemia is not on the path to being stopped by the end of this year, I will be surprised. I think this is actually worth talking about instead of the latest nonsense from TikTok.
The Poll & Music
I am not sure there are many fans of the Spinal Tap parody (turn it up to 11). This happened to be part of my growing up and it still makes me laugh. Here’s their satiric take on creation. When I adjust the volume on my Google smart speakers, I often think of Spinal Tap as the developers at Google had a sense of humor and decided to have the volume level range from 1 to 11. Hah!
What’s Next
The next time we will talk about “It Starts In Your Head”. While I am not quite settled on all the details, I recently was exposed to a point of view which stressed how we can keep our minds settled and lucid. It coincided with an observation I have about what we know and what we don’t. It even has some observations about some great thinkers who might be good at one thing and not so good at something else. It was a lot of fun to write so I hope it is a lot of fun to read! As usual the link above is DEAD until the story publishes on Monday morning. I guess I should call the link a futurelink instead of a hyperlink. Maybe I should protect that word and live off the royalties :)
I love the inverted hockey sticks idea. Very interesting to me that while these new technologies can create new life forms others are spending billions to literally bring back the dodo.
Wow! CRISPR for the price of an iPhone! I'm still trying to wrap my mind around CRISPR, so thanks for this post!