LHC warming up
People are getting excited about the Large Hadron Collider again. When it comes to large dramatic science machines like the Hubble telescope or the Very Large Array, it’s hard not to get excited. It’s clear that we have a lot of romance about space, and that physics is a very prestigious field — name four physicists and four chemists or four biologists and I can bet you’ll be a lot quicker with the first — but I also think that we’re impressed just because it’s big.
My hunch is that things that Craig Venter are doing with synthetic biology are probably significantly more important to humanity the next few decades, and once people realize exactly what we’re doing these days, I think there’s going to be a shock. But because it’s a private enterprise and because it operates on the really small instead of the really big I don’t think we pay it as much attention.
