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April 12, 2011 10:20 pm PDT
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/zNWFaqxgiNM/biopunk03.html
Biopunk in an age without wonder
Marcus Wohlsen has covered startup culture, the maker scene, and the marijuana industry as a reporter in the San Francisco bureau of The Associated Press. His first book, Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life, was published this week by Current. I asked him to contribute a few pieces about the biotech underground to run on Boing Boing. Here's the third one. (Read the first one. Read the second one.) MAKING/HISTORY: Biopunk in an age without wonder In Georgian-era Britain, the surgeon was the commoner among scientists. While bewigged members of the Royal Society enjoyed aristocratic patronage, surgeons lacking both anesthetic and germ theory hacked through a thicket of superstition and rudimentary medical knowledge as they hacked their way through bodies. Universities still considered training in theology and ancient Greek and Roman texts the highest form of civilized learning. Surgeons were not offered the benefits of higher education. Instead, teenagers became apprentices and learned the trade. One of these was a country boy named Edward Jenner. In school, this habitually curious clergyman's son avoided his mandatory study of the classics in favor of raising dormice and collecting fossils. His marks weren't high enough to follow his older brothers to Oxford. Instead, he entered the operating room, where he first heard tales of milkmaids who never got smallpox. The story of how those tales led Jenner to develop the first smallpox vaccine to launch the era of modern immunization has become canonical in the lore of Western science. But it's worth recalling as precedent for the style and spirit in which today's biopunks aspire to operate. Jenner was smart and became a Royal Fellow while still young. But he never took to London and returned to the country. He worked as a physician in his home village of Berkeley. At the same time, he documented the hibernation habits of hedgehogs and the sadistic parenting habits of cuckoos. He launched his own hydrogen balloon twice at the height of the European frenzy over humanity's newfound ability to fly. He discovered that hardened arteries were the cause of angina. All the while he was slowly advancing toward possibly the greatest public health innovation of all time. In all these inquiries, Jenner let his imagination roam. He did not veer off down an alleyway of specialization. He relied on observation and intuition. He tinkered and cared little for orthodoxy. Because science as a way of thinking and doing was still being invented, Jenner necessarily made it up as he went along....
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/zNWFaqxgiNM/biopunk03.html
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