
Meet one of the world’s most groundbreaking scientists. He’s 34 - adenadel
https://www.statnews.com/2015/11/06/hollywood-inspired-scientist-rewrite-code-life/
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_Wintermute
I'm all for scientists getting a bit more recognition, though the timing of
this with the ongoing court case and the very brief mention of Charpentier and
Doudna's work makes it seem a bit suspect.

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jhbadger
And even if the law suit ends up favorably for him, it isn't as if he thought
up the idea of using CRISPR-Cas for gene editing -- he was just (arguably) the
first to get it to work in human cells. It's an impressive achievement, but so
is winning a marathon -- somebody has to be the first to cross the finish
line. To me at least, a "groundbreaking" scientist is somebody who comes up
with something nobody else was even thinking about.

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ChrisLomont
>who comes up with something nobody else was even thinking about

All the "groundbreaking" things I can think of, when I've looked into them,
have always had many people working on it, but we rarely know that as a
society.

Relativity, quantum mech, lasers, transistors, superconductors, TV, radio,
flight, engines galore....

Do you know of any groundbreaking things done "nobody else was even thinking
about" it?

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jhbadger
Well, a lot of the examples you give deal with technological development,
which is different from science as such. For example, as soon as radio was
invented, it was obvious that transmitting pictures was the next thing to do,
and lots of people went to work on trying to do that. And powered flight was
an obvious extension of work on gliders and was likewise very competitive (to
the point that some Europeans doubt the Wright brothers' priority to this
day).

But groundbreaking science is different. There the next step _isn 't_ obvious.
While Einstein certainly benefited from the work of previous scientists like
Poincaré and Lorentz, it wasn't as if there was a "race" to discover
relativity like there was for TV (or CRISPR-Cas in human cells).

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ChrisLomont
>it wasn't as if there was a "race" to discover relativity

Yes, there was. They didn't call it relativity, which is a later name, but
probably dozens to hundreds of scientists were working on exactly what
Einstein is credited for.

Hilbert was close (published equivalent first?), Poincare was working on it
(which is why the symmetries of special relativity are Poincare symmetries),
Lorenz was working on it (which is why special relativity focuses on Lorenz
transforms) , and many, many people were going to do it within a year or less
if Einstein did not do it. There were so many people doing the same thing that
there is an entire field devoted to sorting relativity priority out. Einstein
is simply the one most people associate with it. See [1] for a huge list of
people (and likely not all) that were on the same track at the same time.

And this is also exactly my point. Many things people think were isolated
inventions, because history loses most of those who were going to do it at the
same time (and often did do it sooner, but just lost credit).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute)

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bbctol
Feng Zhang is a cool dude. Cool enough that his name should be in the title.

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Upvoter33
Scientists agree that Doudna/Charpentier deserve the lion's share of credit
for the CRISPR work - if only the Broad institute could agree.

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nullnilvoid
Feng Zhang is a genius. He has done some earth-shattering work.

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RamshackleJ
Like patenting the work of others?

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dogma1138
I find it a bit odd that we now consider 34 being young for scientists.

Newton was 23 when he developed the theory of gravitation, Einstein submitted
his 4 famous papers at 26.

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the_gastropod
Conceptually it kind of makes sense. As time progresses and science advances,
the amount of knowledge scientists are expected to understand expands. A
decent student of science today must know much more than a student in the 17th
Century. That extra learning takes time.

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nuclx
Dude might do impressive stuff, but the video provides little insight except
that trivial regular expressions are supposed to be applicable to the DNA.

