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I recently picked up for a summer read “The Gene” by Siddhartha Mukherjee. As I began to plow through the nearly 600-page book, it seemed to display the accidents and unforeseen circumstances that can track scientific research and technological innovation.

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The Gene begins with Gregor Mendel in the monastery in Brno, now a part of the Czech Republic. There the eventual founder of the science of genetics is perceived as slow, happy in the garden with his peas, not smart or articulate enough to be more than a substitute teacher. The friar abbots try and give him every chance to gain a useful education, and perhaps step up from substitute. And by some phenomenal luck, he’s sent to study in Vienna. Thus, to study under no less than Doppler.

Yes, he comes to study under Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, the mathematician and physicist who proposed that the perceived pitch of sound or the color of light was not fixed but depended on the relative locations and velocities of the observer and the source. His principles on the nature of change in wave frequency influence work that led to today’s radio astronomy efforts, radar, sonar, and more. It must be seen as a happy accident, for Mendel to learn from Doppler, even if he never passed an exam.

Mendel patiently raised peas in his garden. He experimentally crossbred the pea plants and dutifully documented the results. Some viewers have seen him as a plodder, with no theoretical understanding of underlying forces at work. But author Mukherjee assures that Mendel knew “he was trying to unlock the material basis and laws of heredity.”

The author also writes that Doppler’s example as a physicist informed Mendel’s efforts. Mendel found the elements that could reveal an underlying pattern that could be described numerically as he arrayed different bits of data on plants – height, texture, color. That is, a numerical model that marked the inheritance of traits.

This ended up in a research paper presented to the Natural Science Society in Brno. But Mendel’s station at the far reaches of the scientific community assigned his work to a type of oblivion that was a long time in lifting.

Mukherjee cites a geneticist describing this period of oblivion as “one of the strangest silences in the history of biology.”

The Mendel story contrasts with Darwin’s story in Mukherjee’s work. Darwin had a position close to the center in the scientific culture of his day. But Darwin and others struggled to move the science of heredity forward after the big bang of Origin of the Species.

The mechanism was already described — or pointed to — in some measure by Mendel, but his duties as a cleric  led him to be “choked by administrative work,” and his paper became for him a capstone, as he labored as a sanctified clerk. Gradually over decades his work was discovered and replicated, eventually triggering a general evangelization of Mendel.

Yes, the initial wilting on the vine of Mendel’s work was not anything that couldn’t have been foreseen. As Mukherjee observes, Darwin’s reading of his keystone paper took place at the Linnean Society in London. August, not? But Mendel presented at the Natural Science Society of Brno, far afield. That Mendel’s work slashed steadily, like a scythe through the pages of time, until it reached an audience, speaks volumes for its worth. – Jack Vaughan

Related
The Gene – On Amazon
On the Road to the Double-Helix – Progressive Gauge Blost

[Updatte: In August 2024, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay on the implementation of these rules.]

[April 26, 2024] – The stars and planets may seem in their usual places this morning, but change came overnight, as Net Neutrality returned to America. If you blink you missed it, and it’s not guaranteed to stick.

Net Neutrality is again on the books, as the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday voted to restore rules requiring telecommunications companies to treat all apps and sites equally.

“It is incredibly important that there be ongoing oversight for the most important network of the 21st century. It’s that simple,” former FCC chief Tom  Wheeler said on  the Politico Tech podcast on the eve of that vote.

Voted in when Wheeler led the FCC during the Obama era, and then out during the Trump Administration, net neutrality is a technology hot potato in this partisan political climate. Like other Trump era edicts US President Joe Biden has reversed, this one will be challenged via litigation and legislation going forward.

But a return to the Internet as a regulated utility is important. That means no throttling, no superfast lanes, no favors for golf buddies. As the Three Stooges would say: “None of this and none of that.”

That look at blocking is a look back, and not the point today, Wheeler says.

“To define it in terms of no blocking and no throttling. I mean, that is so much yesterday’s issue. The broader question here is, will there be an ongoing expectation for all of the activities of this really important 21st century network? And will there be flexibility on the part of the FCC to deal with those?”

Wheeler’s caution comes as regulation of any kind is widely derided, even as Artificial Intelligence doomsaying predicts an internet more volatile than the often rocky network it is today.

Wheeler, a former cable industry executive who now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government outlines the issues in his  “Techlash – Who makes the rules in the digital Gilded Age?” – a recent book that looks for guides in the history of communications.

The premise of the book is that it’s valuable to look to the 19th century Gilded Age as a clue to what’s going on now in communications.

In the 19th century there were great waves of industrialization as steam, trains and electricity gained traction, workers were exploited, farms gave way to cities, and Robber Barrons leveraged all.

Today, we all agree, there’s been great waves of technology changing the way we live, and how that is communicated. What we came to call mass communications – evolved out of the telegraph, the telephone, radio and television. These all took time to settle….

This is how Wheeler poses it in Techlash:

“While the economic model is still about maximizing revenue, it is no longer about the need for balance and veracity. Like the early ideological media, the new media profits by playing to users’ preferences and prejudices. The difference is that software algorithms organize the information to deliver what each user likes in order to hold the user’s attention to see as many revenue generating ads as possible.”

Technology companies make money “through the most sophisticated and secret content curation ever devised,” Wheeler writes. Let’s take this to include Big Data, algorithms, collaborative filtering, portals, recommendation engines, personalization engines and a parade of machine learning models.

With a next age of AI bubbling in a slew of Large Language Models, that secret curation model has already remade media and society. Having an FCC that works for a neutral network is important as that next age looms. – J Vaughan

Late last year I had the opportunity to cover Multicloud issues for Muse at SDxCentral, and it was a bit of an eye opener in this regard. We were writing about cloud over 30 years ago, and utility and grid computing before that. But a visit to cloud computing today finds obstacles yet to confront.

The Multicloud milieu today seemed to say there was still very little in the way of deep integration between clouds, all these years later. It seems another case in the evolution of computing  where every new solution seems to hold the seeds of its own obsolescence.

Read Evolving technology paradigms create rising complexity on Medium

Looking back today at “American Prometheus” – the book upon which this summer’s widely noted Oppenheimer film is based. Recalling I fashioned a mini tour/book review covering Oppenheimer’s Cambridge as I originally read Kai Bird’s and Martin J Sherwin’s 2005 book.

Yes, it’s still summer, so, I am sharing it here! With some editing. Editing is ever with us.

Oppenheimer’s tragedy truly is an American tragedy, and it is too little known. Worth noting: The creation of the Atom bomb is the ultimate tale of science and technology for bad and good. It redefined life for the generations that followed.

At the start, in his college days, the leader of the team of scientists that created the first A-bomb was a delicate mesh of scientist and poet. In the end, he was a heart-broken figure, done in by his lethal invention, and his soft-spot for arty friends who, steeped in the ethos of their times, promoted liberal and communist causes.

Oppenheimer did not have his roots in Boston, but he did pass through here, like so many others. It was in the air in Boston/Cambridge as much as anywhere: the mechanical, fluid and electronic sounds of a military-industrial complex based on the scientific breakthroughs and technical innovations of the mid-20th Century.

The son of a wealthy West Side New York clothier, Oppenheimer refused the fellowship Harvard offered him when he entered the university in 1922.Oppenheimer began his Harvard days as a chemistry student.

The chemist had been the epitome of the scientist – but that was changing just as he was entering college. He was not looking for a lucrative career. Oppenheimer worried his future would be that of an industrial chemist, testing toothpastes. But physics was uncovering wonder after wonder. He read prodigiously. His tenure at Harvard preceded construction of the Mallinckrodt Lab, so his chemistry studies were like in the basement of University Hall in Harvard Yard.

He looked to take as many advanced physics classes as he possibly could. He didn’t have the basic courses. But he read five science books a week. And he was picking physics texts unknown to the typical student. American Prometheus authors report that one physics professor, reviewing Oppy’s petition [replete with a list of texts he’d read] to take graduate classes, remarked: “Obviously, if he says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a PH.D. for knowing their titles.” He was brash and precocious.

The famous figures of science and math [in which Oppenheimer thought himself deficient] passed through Harvard’s gates. Oppenheimer attended lectures by Whitehead and Bohr. Still, he nurtured a love for literature. He was a great polymath. He read The Waste Land, and wrote poetry of sadness and loneliness. He edited a school literary journal known as The Gad-Fly [under the auspices of the Liberal Club at 66 Winthrop St]. After Harvard, he discovered Proust.

He kept much to himself. Had but a few friends. “His diet often consisted of little more than chocolate, beer and artichokes. Lunch was often just a ‘black and tan’ – a piece of toast slathered with peanut butter and topped with chocolate syrup.” When he lived in Cambridge, like so many other great scientific thinkers in so many places, he took to long walks. He lived for a while at 60 Mount Auburn Street.

A mentor at Harvard could well have been future Nobelist Percy Bridgman. Oppenheimer admired a strain in this physicist noted for his studies of materials at high temperatures and pressures and his openness to imaginatively approaching the philosophy of science.

“Oppy’s” outsider status at Harvard could be laid to his sensitivity, but just as significant if not more so was his Jewish heritage. He came to the school at a time when its head was considering a quota system to reduce the growing number of Jewish entrants. Surely, the straight road to Harvard success was not fully open to him, even if that is what he’d desired. He was offered a graduate teaching position but turned it down.

Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in three years. He wrote a friend: “Even in the last stages of senile aphasia I will not say that education, in an academic sense, was only secondary when I was at college. I plough through about five or ten big scientific books a week, and pretend to research. Even if, in the end, I’ve got to satisfy myself with testing toothpaste, I don’t want to know it till it has happened.”

From Harvard he went on to study in Gottingen in Germany, Thomson’s famed Cavendish Lab, CalTech, Berkeley, and, after the War, Princeton. Surely the Jewish Ethical Culture School he attended as a lad, which had a summer school adjunct in New Mexico, and the mesas of New Mexico, where he placed the crucial workings of the Manhattan Project, was most formative.

He and his friends skipped the Harvard commencement to drink lab alcohol in a dorm room. He had one drink and retired.

Other books on this topic worth noting include “Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project” by Leslie Groves and, most particularly, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes.