Science Saved My Soul
This video is extremely beautiful. It is a bit long (15 minutes) but well worth every second. Commit your undivided attention to it and you will understand why it almost brought a tear to my eye.
Synthetic biology, with its goal of reengineering cells as industrial machines, is the epitome of ambition. But even in a field of risk-takers, Church stands out. “He always talks about such wild experiments,” says J. Christopher Anderson, a synthetic biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of Church’s collaborators. “And then he rolls them out. He actually makes some of them work.”
balancing patience
Well, here’s the thing. Yes, life is a marathon, but whether you define success by recognition, respect, money, power or fame – success is subjective, relative and fluid and boils down to Ambition, Vision, Determination, Execution, Luck and Timing.
In other words, success doesn’t fall in your lap; never has, never will. Besides, life’s too short, so don’t sit back.
“I haven’t got a lot of patience”, Jeffrey Katzenberg
It’s not that patience isn’t valued; it’s that no one else is actually all that patient. Whether you are growing a business or chasing a girl or trying to lose weight or auditioning on American Idol, no one will sit around and wait for results.
They will be impatient. This doesn’t mean you should be impatient, it just means that in the words of George Jackson: “Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it’s cowardice.”
Success is Most Definitely a Target, Albeit a Moving One
Regardless of what drives you and how you define it, people care about the outcome of your efforts and not the journey; frankly, the experience you gain throughout your journey is really only of value to you. But since we have limited needs but infinite wants, we tend to compete with everybody for the spoils. As such, if you think that you will be rewarded for your patience, you’re a sucker, and will end up a loser.
This Ain’t The Super Bowl
It’s commonplace to use sports analogies in business, I do it all the time. But whereas in sports you compete with one or multiple individuals or teams, in business you ultimately compete against yourself: Apple really didn’t care that much about Research In Motion’s Blackberry.
Once you venture into a business, you need to put enough points on the board and then manage the clock (told you I liked sports analogies). To do that you need to get ahead.
People who Preach Patience are Patronizing You
“We are telling the American people to have patience, courage, resolve and determination” Muammar Gaddafi.
Oftentimes those who urge you to remain patient are in fact patronizing you. As football coach Steve Spurrier said: ”If people like you too much, it’s probably because they’re beating you”.
Be honest: how often has someone you looked up to told you that if you basically sat on your ambition and dreams they’d eventually open doors for you.
How often did they deliver? Let me jog your memory: never. If they did, it’s because you posed no threat to them. You will be successful despite those people, not because of them.
In a spare bedroom of his family’s house in County Cork, Ireland, Cathal Garvey is repeating the feats that led to the dawn of the biotechnology age. He’s growing bacteria. He’s adding DNA. He’s seeing what happens.
“To transform bacteria was once a huge deal, a new method,” he explains. “Today, you can do it with Epsom salt and an over-the-counter brand of laxatives.”
Garvey, who is 26, dropped out of a PhD program at a big cancer lab two years ago. Instead of giving up on science, however, he started doing it on his own, spending $4,000 to equip a laboratory in his parent’s house. As a member of the “do-it-yourself” biology movement, Garvey takes inspiration from the early days of hobby computers, when garage tinkerers spawned companies like Apple and the rest of the PC industry. The idea now is that anyone—not only big-budget academic labs or large companies—should be able to practice biotechnology.
Garvey was still working toward his PhD when he tried his first at-home experiment: isolating pale-blue bioluminescent bacteria from squid he purchased from a Cork fishmonger. It was a beginner’s experiment, but he says he immediately realized he had a choice to make: “Would I finish and get a few letters after my name, or seize the day and do something that needed to be done?”
His goal, he says, is to show that biology can be done in an open-source fashion, and on a shoestring budget. Instead of beakers, he uses recycled jars. A sterilizer is rigged from a pressure cooker and a hot plate. To feed his germs, he boils potatoes into a starchy mix. “In a university you are trained to think that this is all too expensive and difficult to do on your own,” he says.
DIY biology is part of a wider trend in design that’s sometimes called maker culture: people are using 3-D printing services or cheap, custom electronic circuits to develop prototypes of gadgets, products, or vehicles. Now that amateurs can put rockets into space, what’s to stop them from genetically modifying life forms in the kitchen?
