

Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems - jcarden
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428793/three-questions-for-george-whitesides/

======
rubidium
Q: "What problems are being neglected?"

Whitesides: "I don't have strong feelings about that. There are so many
problems in the world"

I've was recently at a conference with a bunch of Nobel Prize winners in
Physics and Chemistry. I was asking them a similar question, and some version
of Whitesides reply was what I almost always got.

------
6ren

      it's very easy in academic science to end up working on projects that are just
      little extensions of previously known stuff, and that's sort of a waste of time.

------
__Joker
I get page not found error for the op's submission. But I assume this is the
page which was submitted, <http://www.technologyreview.in/biomedicine/41024/>

~~~
jcarden
I believe your link is for the MIT Technology Review India version of the
article.

------
001sky
_Technology Review: What's the problem you have most wanted to solve and
haven't been able to?

Whitesides: There's an intellectual problem, which is the origin of life. The
origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a
chemist, which I just don't understand. I don't understand how you go from a
system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a
Darwinian set of reactions that are getting more complicated spontaneously. I
just don't understand how that works. So that's a scientific problem._

\--This is a rare, intellectually honest view of Evolution. Notice, there is
reasonable doubt. However so constrained.

~~~
bootload
_"... The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in
there as a chemist, I don't understand how you go from a system that's random
chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactions
that are getting more complicated spontaneously. ..."_

Interesting. Turing had a go at this in his last paper, _"The Chemical Basis
of Morphogenesis,"_ [0] ~
[http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing....](http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing...).
attempted to answer the theoretical explanation of the biological process that
defines the shape of an embryonic organism from creation. This process is
called _"Morphogenesis"_ This is an important problem because complex
organisms appear to be created by some _"random"_ process that organises what
appear to be self similar cells. (previously written at ~
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077817>

~~~
joshuaeckroth
There is a recent keynote[1] by Christos H. Papadimitriou about Turing and
Darwin, and Turing's paper that you mentioned. The talk also ends with a very
emotional account of the speaker's connection with Turing.

[1]:
[http://videolectures.net/aaai2012_papadimitriou_computable_n...](http://videolectures.net/aaai2012_papadimitriou_computable_numbers/)

