The New Idiom | The Student Newsletter of the IIT Institute of Design

The design of living things

by Vince LaConte

Last summer, the geneticist Craig Venter, whose private company was the first to sequence the full human genome in 2001, made a startling announcement. His lab, the Venter Institute, had devised genome transplantation methods that allowed them literally to transform one species of bacteria into another, simply by transplanting the DNA in its nucleus. In Venter's words,

Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn't matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube [and injected into a cell]. This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It's not a question of 'if', or 'how', but 'when', and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.

This development, not surprisingly, has led to much renewal of hand-wringing among ethicists, along the lines of "we shouldn't be playing God", and that by tinkering directly with the source-code of life, we will begin a slide down a slippery slope towards genocide, eugenics or some other disaster.

Blogging Lecturette

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Ash Bhoopathy and Vince LaConte presented a lecturette last week about "Blogging, Wikis, and you". Here are a few takeaways:

• If you want to blog, it's relatively easy and safe to get started immediately using ID's multi user wordpress server.


• Get used to using RSS to read news/commentary and del.icio.us to find and classify information for yourself, because you never know what it might be interesting to draw a connection from later on.


• Blogiquette: If you use someone else's material, make sure you link to them to acknowledge work.


• Use the ID Wiki. It's good stuff, and I forget it's there sometimes but I'm really glad when I remember.

By Daniel Erwin

Exploring the edge

A couple years ago I surfed upon a strange little publication called Edge.org. Edge is both a non-profit organization and a publication, organized by "literary impresario" John Brockman, a literary agent who represents more of the world's leading scientists, philosophers, artists and cutting edge thinkers than probably anyone else. The ostensible mission of Edge is to promote the existence of a "third culture" of thought between the historically separate sciences and the arts communities:

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

by Vince LaConte

Virtual worlds: Prototyping Canvases and new methods for Human understanding

by ash bhoopathy

Overheard at the Foster El stop in Evanston between two [seemingly] college-aged students, one donning a black hoodie and the other slightly larger built wearing a red coat.

black hoodie: I didn't even finish my homework for this class, I was addicted to second life last night talking to Erica and I fell asleep.
red coat: Are you serious? I can't believe you use second life. Seems like the nerdiest thing ever.
bh: What do you mean?
rc: Just shoot me the day I stop having social interactions with friends to go on some online world. It's just not the same.
bh: and how often do you check your Facebook?
rc: Oh, all the time. but that's different..
[train approaches]

Why do we ostracize second lifers as pariahs that "can't fit in" to the real world, but twitter away to our heart's content and update our Facebook status on an hourly basis? How many of us (if we consider ourselves early adopters) have seen the number of friends who use social networking sites increasing dramatically within the past year or so?