IV. Useful phrases. Try to remember some more
Lesson 8 Handout
Scientists have two basic choices as communicators. They can aim to be proficient and functional, or they can strive for higher levels of literary skill, even mastery. The first of these choices is for everyone; the second is not. Room exists in science for both, and both certainly exist.
I. Phonetic drill
II. Read the following characteristics of functional and proficient style. What belongs to which one. Sort it out.
| This style of writing requires, a type of intense concentration, like chess or playing an instrument. This, too, is a skill. | You need a sense of good and bad grammar, an ability to impose order (sometimes out of chaos), the power to think visually (for illustrations), an ear for monologue. |
| It implies writing in a clearly organized fashion, without too many significant grammatical and syntactic errors | This mode is preferred by a majority of professionals. |
| The reader is the priority of Ingredient X: it melds clarity and creativity, it uses narrative to scaffold ideas, and it brings tangible words out of abstract and remote ones. Without X we end up with a set of dull lists, easily forgotten and glazed over, but with X, we end up with a set of absorbable ideas that are easily digested and more likely to be remembered | Generating new knowledge is a creative act, with two scenes—investigation and composition. |
| It embodies the philosophy that writing and speaking are methods for making knowledge available in an efficient, usable manner | dense, uninspiring language that can be laborious to wade through and difficult to understand, coined as ‘The Official Style |
| Ultimately, readily absorbable writing saves time for the reader and ensures an author’s message is read, understood, and remembered. That alone is worth valuing. | We can argue that scientists are not trained writers or that not everyone is a naturally gifted writer, but we cannot dispute that we spend most of our working lives writing and, like any skill in science, some people will be more interested in it than others. |
| This objectivity is bound together by unbiased and thorough scholarship of the topic. | Those writers are able to write and speak accurately, with reasonable precision |
| Those pieces of writing are bound to convention because reviewers and journal editors demand it. There is also an entrenched perception that publications are only for scientists (but see Box 2) and scientists want publications the way that they are. | Writing is a process of experimentation. This is a crucial reality for scientists, and indeed for all professionals. |
III. Compare the following extracts. What style do the authors exploit?
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1) For the past four billion years or so the only way for life on Earth to produce a sequence of dna—a gene—was by copying a sequence it already had to hand. Sometimes the gene would be damaged or scrambled, the copying imperfect or undertaken repeatedly. From that raw material arose the glories of natural selection. But beneath it all, gene begat gene. That is no longer true. Now genes can be written from scratch and edited repeatedly, like text in a word processor. The ability to engineer living things which this provides represents a fundamental change in the way humans interact with the planet’s life. It permits the manufacture of all manner of things which used to be hard, even impossible, to make: pharmaceuticals, fuels, fabrics, foods and fragrances can all be built molecule by molecule. What cells do and what they can become is engineerable, too. Immune cells can be told to follow doctors’ orders; stem cells better coaxed to turn into new tissues; fertilised eggs programmed to grow into creatures quite unlike their parents.
The earliest stages of such “synthetic biology” are already changing many industrial processes, transforming medicine and beginning to reach into the consumer world (see Technology Quarterly). Progress may be slow, but with the help of new tools and a big dollop of machine learning, biological manufacturing could eventually yield truly cornucopian technologies. Buildings may be grown from synthetic wood or coral. Mammoths produced from engineered elephant cells may yet stride across Siberia. The scale of the potential changes seems hard to imagine. But look back through history, and humanity’s relations with the living world have seen three great transformations: the exploitation of fossil fuels, the globalisation of the world’s ecosystems after the European conquest of the Americas, and the domestication of crops and animals at the dawn of agriculture. All brought prosperity and progress, but with damaging side-effects. Synthetic biology promises similar transformation. To harness the promise and minimise the peril, it pays to learn the lessons of the past.
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2) Synthetic biology is the science of designing biological systems. The term “synthetic biology” has been used during the past century to describe a wide range of projects that bring an engineering mindset to biology. These include the formation of biological shapes by the osmotic motion of inks in salt solutions, the achievements of recombinant DNA technology, the synthesis of non-native biological chemistry6 or “never born proteins,” the construction of protocells, and the identification of a minimal gene set for a free-living bacterium. Today, synthetic biology is characterized primarily by three distinct research programs related to the design of biological systems: the large scale synthesis of microbial genomes, the production of commodity chemicals through the redesign of metabolic pathways, or the rational design of genetic logic devices from modular DNA parts. This review covers literature on the diverse intersections of biology and design in contemporary synthetic biology, providing new spectives on
biological design in cellular, technological, and social context. The promise of these potential applications as well as the emphasis on design has prompted critical reflection on synthetic biology from design theorists and practicing designers from many fields, who can bring valuable perspectives to the discipline. While interdisciplinary connections between biologists and engineers have built synthetic biology via the science and the technology of biology, interdisciplinary collaboration with artists, designers, and social theorists can provide insight on the connections between technology and society. Such collaborations can open up new avenues and new principles for research and design, as well as shed new light on the challenging context-dependenceboth biological and socialthat face living technologies at many scales.
IV. Useful phrases. Try to remember some more
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Peril and promise
From controversy to consensus
Friend and foe
Communication and conflict
Bag and baggage
Safe and sound
Clear and clean
Chalk and cheese
Chop and change
Do or die
I. Read the following extract from news. What questions to the essence of the experiment would inevitably arise? What would you like to know in greater detail?
| Scientists have built a bacterium that contains the minimal genetic ingredients needed for free living. This bacterium’s entire set of genetic blueprints, its genome, consists of only 473 genes, including 149 whose precise biological function is unknown, researchers report in the March 25 Science. The newly-created bacterium contains a minimalist version of the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides. Mycoplasmaalready have some of the smallest known genomes. M. mycoides used in the experiments started with 901 genes. In comparison, other bacteria, including E. coli, may have 4,000 to 5,000 genes. Humans have more than 22,000 genes, although not all are necessary (SN: 4/2/16, p. 18). In 2010, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, Calif., replicated the entire genome of M. mycoides and popped it into a cell of a different species, Mycoplasma capricolum, creating what some people called the first synthetic organism (SN: 6/19/10, p. 5). The new work strips the M. mycoides genome down to its essential elements before transplanting it to the M. capricolum shell, producing a minimal bacteria dubbed syn3.0. Researchers hope syn3.0’s uncluttered genome will teach them more about the basics of biology. Such minimal genome bacteria also may be chassis on which to build custom-made microbes for producing drugs or chemicals. |
II. Read the structured abstract of the original paper and find the possible answers. Insert the verbs into a text.
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