Susannah Locke

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“The Junk That Our Athletes Take Now To Grow Muscle Mass And So Forth, That’s Going To Be Prehistoric”

November 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Someday the only complaint people will have about athletes using PEDs back in the day will be that the methods were shockingly crude. Limbs will eventually be aided by exoskeletons and tissue engineering. The former will likely be available on a fairly sophisticated level in our time, the latter in a future one. A segment from Susannah Locke’s Vox post about tomorrow’s bionic technology:

“Steroids are nothing compared to what’s coming

The military could possibly use the tissue-engineering approach to someday develop strong supersoldiers. ‘It would be figuring out a way to get our normal ability to grow muscle cells and tissues to be even better. So you would introduce stem cells that would help the muscles grow.’

This may, however, be a ways off. ‘I won’t be around to see it,’ [University of Pennsylvania ethicist Jonathan] Moreno says. ‘But I think in 30, 40, 50 years there will be some of that. And the junk that our athletes take now to grow muscle mass and so forth, that’s going to be prehistoric. I really think that tissues will be the way to go.’

‘That’s going to start mostly with tissues for therapeutic purposes, not for enhancement. You’ve got the tissue engineers and the people working with these new induced pluripotent stem cells and things like that, are trying to find alternatives to organ transplants. And eventually I have no doubt that people will find that there are some ways of using programs like that to build muscle.'”

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“There Was One Man Who Was Ousted From His Church Because He Had Seen Such A Machine”

September 10, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A follow-up post to the recent one about the history of air conditioning in the U.S., here’s an exchange about initial resistance to the machines from an interview with Salvatore Basile, author of Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed America, by Susannah Locke of Vox:

“Question:

There seemed to be a ton of resistance to the idea of air conditioning. People weren’t even interested in the idea of getting cooler air. Why was that?

Salvatore Basile: 

The US is a puritan country. And because we’re a puritan country, I found that there were people who would quote the book of Amos from the Bible as the reason — that the Lord was the being who created the wind. In other words, man was not to do this. So fans were inherently sinful. This, I think, carried on to the idea of any machine that would change the weather, even though heat was something that we’d been doing for millennia.

The idea of cooling your own air, I have a feeling, to many people that felt very self-indulgent at the time. I think they objected to that from a moral standpoint. So the idea that human comfort would be mixed up with morals, well that’s sort of a bad place for the PR of air conditioning to exist. And when we got into the idea of having a machine that could actually cool the air (and the first examples of that were in the 19th century), there was one man who was ousted from his church because he had seen such a machine. And it was powered by a steam engine, and his church committee had accused him of lying because such a thing could not exist. It was against nature.

So transferring that into the modern time, I think there were many people who thought

God made bad weather so you should just put up with it.’ And I think the idea of dealing with heat was to ignore it. Indeed, in Victorian society, one must ignore hot weather because it did not exist. That was simply the given standard of behavior for the time. And so many people would ignore it and then keel over from heat stroke.

With that kind of mindset in the population, to offer them the chance to be cool did create a lot of opposition at first.”

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“Ideally, Helpful Organisms Would Eat Things We Don’t Need”

June 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Susannah Locke’s Vox primer about synthetic biology, which could be both really great and really messy, a few potential uses of these new cellular designs:

“Medicine: Synthetic biology might one day let scientists program cells to precisely detect and kill cancer cells. Or perhaps program cells to self-assemble into spare organs for transplants. Some scientists are already using partially synthetic organisms to manufacture drugs that are otherwise impractical to make.

Food and fragrances: In theory, new techniques could allow researchers to design yeast to make the perfect beer or wine. Or create food in the lab more efficiently than growing it on land. ‘We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature,’ biologist and entrepreneur Craig Venter told the New York Times.

Already, synthetic biology companies are selling orange and grapefruit flavorings produced by yeast. And the company Evolva makes yeast-generated artificial vanilla flavoring and is working on better tasting sugar substitutes.

Energy and environment: Another possibility is that synthetic biologists could program cells to produce usable fuel. For example, Exxon Mobile has a partnership with Synthetic Genomics (co-founded by Craig Venter) to research fuel from algae. Ideally, helpful organisms would eat things we don’t need, like non-edible plant matter. Even more ideally, they’d eat the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that’s warming the planet. Or toxic waste or oil from oil spills.

The weird stuff: How about some microbes that live on your skin to prevent you from getting oily and smelly? How about some other ones that secrete the perfume of your choice? How about some that quickly break down cholesterol so it won’t clog people’s arteries?”

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