Skip to main content

Lone Frank – Four Way Interview

Lone Frank is the author of The Neurotourist: Postcards from the edge of brain science. She holds a PhD in neurobiology and was previously a research scientist in the biotechnology industry. An award winning science journalist, she has written for many top publications. She lives in Copenhagen. Her latest book is My Beautiful Genome.
Why science?
I was always fascinated by knowing about and understanding the world, especially the living world. Then, in high school I was completely bowled by the first taste of the mysteries of the nervous system. I knew right then that I wanted to work with brains and went through university with that goal in mind. Having gotten my Ph.D. by way of killing rats and slicing up their brains for three years, the specialisation of a research career would stand in the way of seeing the bigger picture. So I quit practical research and went into science communication in order to concern myself with that more general understanding which was the original fascination.
Why this book?
What most interests me about science is how it affects our culture and way of thinking. And right now, what is about to change our thinking about our selves is the development in genetics. You could call it the genetic revolution’s second wave. It is biology’s parallel to the PC revolution. Just like computers changed our lives when they made the transition from expert tool to cheap every day commodity, consumer genetics will influence us by becoming a ubiquitous factor. Within a foreseeable future we will all routinely handle personal genetic information. It will not only shape personal health care but give us radically new in-sight into the basis for our mental habitus – personality, IQ, temperament etc. I think this will cause a cultural shift by ushering in a much more biological view of who we are. By sharing my personal journey into consumer genetics, I hope to open this wondrous new world to those who think genetics is academic and abstract. From now on, genetics is all about you.
What’s next?
There is much talk of ‘dark matter’ in the genome and ‘missing heritability’. I believe the coming years bringing massive whole genome sequencing of humans from all ethnic groups will throw light on the mysteries of how certain combinations of genetic variants and environmental factors together result in various phenotypes. My bet is there will be big surprises, some perhaps exploding our ideas of how heritability works – it will be thrilling to follow the discoveries.
What’s exciting you at the moment?
I find it really fascinating to watch how the world map of science and research is in flux. Especially Asian countries like Singapore, South Korea and certainly India and China are getting into the game big time and the question is whether or how this will affect the priorities and directions of research in the future.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune )   underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more