Issue 16: I dream of genes
Issue 16: I dream of genes
Plus: how humans are outdoing nature's shiniest creations; the history of measuring price rises; and how America's favourite type of coffee got really, really good.
The latest Works in Progress issue, Issue 16, is out now.
Its lead article explains how CRISPR allows us to make use of natural gene drives – ultra-selfish genes – to force genes into animal species, and potentially wipe out malaria.
The issue also includes pieces about:
Why lab-grown and lab-made diamonds are now better than natural diamonds in every way, plus cheaper;
What you will find if you go into one of the world’s materials libraries;
How to start your own advance market commitment, and buy inventions from the future;
The history of America’s favorite coffee type: pour over;
How much we don’t know about the Ancient World, and what newly discovered texts might end up teaching us.
Read our newsletters for Issues 15, 14, and 13.
Malaria infects 250 million people and kills 600,000 each year, most of whom are children. Our lead essay explains how new gene-editing technologies could take this to zero in the next decade. Some naturally occurring genes are ultra-selfish, says Mathias Kirk Bonde, and get themselves passed on more often than others. But in nature this process is pruned by evolution itself: genes have to make their carriers prosper to survive. CRISPR and Cas9 allow us to edit genes into species that will copy themselves into their heirs, and with the right design they could propagate across an entire species. We can use these to create mosquitoes unable to carry malaria, vulnerable to more environmentally-friendly pesticides, or even totally infertile. Doing this could save millions of animal and human lives.
Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and quite a bit cheaper than mined diamonds. A natural diamond takes billions of years to form, under conditions of high pressure and high heat. But in 1954, chemist Howard Tracy Hall pressurized some carbon to 100,000 atmospheric levels at 1,600 degrees Celsius and created the world’s first artificial diamond. Since then it has been onwards and upwards, according to Javid Lakha.
Both the Americans and the Soviets invented higher-pressure higher-temperature (HPHT) higher-dimensional presses. At the same time, other researchers worked out how to make diamonds out of gas. Early lab-grown diamonds were tiny and low quality. Today they are five times cheaper than the De Beers ones that come out of the ground, and purer.
To many artists, designers, engineers, and creators, normal libraries are just a bit… intangible, reports Virginia Postrel. What is the counterpart to a library of books? A library of stuff: somewhere you might find a shiny black grille of carbon fiber, a bottle of pure premium recycled glass, a vial of milky latex from the guayule plant, or even an artisanal seafood leather – all in the same place. They are what one creator calls a ‘petting zoo for materials’, starting with 1997’s Material Connexion in New York and then opening up all over the globe. Materials libraries argue that tangible substances sometimes need to be experienced to be understood properly – they are places where one can still today get hands-on experience with the stuff that makes the world.
You might think that measuring how much prices have risen in a given period of time in a given currency or country is a boring technocratic question that ultimately has a correct and indisputable answer. You might think that, says Carola Conces Binder, but you would be dead wrong. Count Gian Rinaldo Carli invented inflation measurement in 1764 out of pure academic curiosity. But governments did not start following his lead until they had strong political reasons to want to generate this information: the USA first generated price indices during the Civil War, as part of a case arguing that inflation had not been as bad as some people claimed. We have got better and better at measuring inflation over time, but such indices are still politically fraught today, especially outside the most developed countries.
Many inventions would be good for the world, but don’t exist because the market for them is not fully formed yet. Others, such as vaccines, would be good for the world, but cannot get funding because their would-be customers are too poor. What these situations need is an advance market commitment, or AMC, argues Nan Ransohoff. These are a promise to buy some future technology if someone can bring it into existence. They are the mechanism that powered Operation Warp Speed, which delivered a working vaccine for Covid into arms just a few months after the pandemic struck, and they are similar to how Nasa created the microchip market during the postwar period, buying chips at high prices until chipmakers had worked their way down the cost curve. Nan herself has started an AMC for carbon removal. And she wants to help others start their own, for new vaccines as well as things like green concrete and other promising climate technologies.
Espresso was invented to save time – hence the name. A skilled barista can make ten espressos during the five or six minutes it takes to hand-make a cup of pour-over coffee. But the clean, pure taste of pour-over coffee, its association with a wider range of single-origin and light-roast coffee beans, and the ritual it involves, have together meant this method of making coffee has never gone away, argues Nick Whitaker. Yet that time has meant shops have always been frustrated by it. Devices like Starbucks’s Clover and the Poursteady aimed to change this, but they haven’t yet succeeded. Yet.
Only one percent of texts from the Ancient World survive. But even these surviving texts are often copies of copies, with inaccuracies we cannot identify. The earliest copy of the New Testament we have, discovered in a monastery’s trash basket in Egypt in 1844, lacked the passage ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’. New discoveries enabled by the Vesuvius Challenge could turn our understanding of the Ancients on its head, explains Justin Germain.
Invisible College
We recently hosted a week-long summer school in Cambridge for 18-22 year olds interested in improving science, understanding the Industrial Revolution, and creating durable, politically viable reforms to wicked social problems. As Stripe Press’s Tammy Winter put it, the vibe of the week was that ‘you can just do things’.
We hope to host the summer school again next year, and a larger day-long conference for those who would have liked to go but couldn’t be included. Stay tuned for details.
Even more from Works in Progress
We’re hosting several speakers from ARIA in London on Wednesday 18 September. We’re at capacity for this event: you can join the waitlist here. To get in early for future events in London, you can sign up for invitations here.
A single ingredient makes people honk their horns more, post more hate speech online, and commit more murder, assault, rape, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings: being too hot.
The question of whether cramming more and more people into cities reduces fertility rates is still open. But one recent (and widely shared) paper that claims that population density lowers fertility provides no evidence at all for its claim.
Samuel Watling wrote a guide from history to making a New Town successful.
Chapter Three of Stewart Brand’s ‘Book in Progress’, Maintenance: Of Everything is out, and it’s his most popular ever.
Sam and Ben wrote about how changing tax incentives for local governments could create much more support for building data centers, prisons and other infrastructure in NIMBY-dominated areas in the UK.
How to write for Works in Progress
Our guide to pitching Works In Progress includes guidelines on the sort of articles we are (and aren’t) looking for right now, and some of the subjects we’re most excited about.
What we’ve been up to
Saloni wrote an article about bubonic plague and the uncertainties in how many people died from the Black Death across Europe. She also wrote about how antipsychotic medications were developed over history, and how antiretroviral therapy changed the lives of people with HIV.
Nick became a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and published his first report, A Playbook for AI Policy.
Sam launched the Greater London Project, a group for Londoners who want their city to be bigger and better-run, and made the case for upzoning the city to allow it to double in population size (and went on the radio to talk about it). He also tried Wildtype’s lab-grown salmon, which he thought was pretty good.
Ben wrote for the Greater London Project on how a tiny minority of drivers cause a big wodge of the accidents and crime we experience on the road – the uninsured – and how we could easily get them off the road by giving police access to automatic numberplate recognition camera data. He also wrote about fixing struggling retail centers and shopping streets with new local powers and land value capture.
Rachel shared her frustration with the human body’s inability to adapt to a world of abundant food, and photographed the beautiful wall tiles in the Marylebone Waitrose.
Stuff we liked from around the web
How Ireland can build transit infrastructure with European costs instead of Anglosphere costs. This is the debut briefing from Progress Ireland, a new think tank launched by Sean Keyes, Sean O’Neill McPartlin, Luke Fehily and Fergus McCullough that aims to bring good ideas from overseas to Ireland.
Asimov Press launched its beautiful first print edition.
Cities can grow fast. Cardiff, the capital of Wales, grew 1,000 percent in 45 years, making Wales the only country in Europe with net immigration, when extensive coalfields were discovered there. Many of these Victorian neighborhoods are still prized today. And maps showing how much less London has grown since 1945 than New York and Paris. More.
Former UK Prime Minister and Chancellor Gordon Brown created a mini baby boom in the late 90s and early 00s – perhaps one in 100 of the babies born then were born due to incentives he created.
The Maldives is reclaiming 1,280 hectares of land from a lagoon. It’s paying the contractor by giving them four percent of the land they recover.
Concorde used to take off in London at 1pm and land in New York at 12.10pm. I know that was then, but it could be again.
Edmund Morel, a British engineer, was shipped over to Japan to build Japan’s first railway in 1872: Tokyo to Yokohama. But now Britain should look the other way.
Chernobyl put the nail in the coffin of nuclear power in many places. A recent study estimates that the associated decline of nuclear power caused the loss of 318 million expected life years globally.
Czechia is contracting Korea’s KEPCO to build it cheap nuclear power plants – when finished, nuclear power will produce half of the country’s electricity.
As long as you’re not in the flight path, being close to a road to the airport makes your house much more valuable.
Salt was the most important commodity and product in the preindustrial world.
Today’s biotech boom comes more from an institutional change than a technological breakthrough: the ability to patent new organisms.
Paris is extending tube lines at a cost of £240 per mile, about five times cheaper than the UK, and 15 times cheaper than the last New York extension.
Why YIMBYs are divided on the plan to build a new city in Solano County, California, between Sacramento and the Bay Area.
The urban growth boundaries that prohibit building around many of the world’s cities are not entirely new. Nottinghamshire’s cow grazers had rights to common land that they had no ability to sell, and so Nottingham was, until the 1830s, much more squeezed and constrained than other UK cities.
Two new academic studies show that e-cigarettes cut smoking among young people.
Our best evidence suggests that epigenetics is the source of aging. Could we use this knowledge, and re-program cells to be young again?
More evidence that SGLT2 inhibitors – flozins – extend life. (Read about them in Issue 14 of WIP.)
Why don’t we build beautifully? Ross Douthat reviews Samuel Hughes’s work on the declining cost of ornament in the New York Times.
The Belle Epoque gave us the Olympics, the Tour de France, FIFA, Wimbledon, the French and Australian Opens, plus the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes and the Michelin Guide. Was it our greatest ever era for competitions?
Multiethnic societies often have issues. But they can also be stable, peaceful, and prosperous, and understanding how that can break down is the key to preserving them.
There is now a twice-yearly injection that has over 96 percent efficacy in preventing HIV infections.
A study claiming Ozempic may cause blindness has many flaws.