The big question is what lessons the emerging students—and the disgraced teacher—should learn from recent events. How far should the balance between governments and markets shift? … Provocative as it may sound in today’s febrile and dangerous climate, freer and more flexible markets will still do more for the world economy than the heavy hand of government.

Some people never learn as the Economist in Dreamland demonstrates. I subscribe to the Economist as a comics book, and apparently am in the distinguished company of Dani Rodrik who reads it because “even a broken clock is right twice” …

EE right wingers, Ayn Nonsensians and their ilk are in the same boat, in denial that there could be anything amiss with the Perfect System. Er … what about the recent events? That’s just the result of the “heavy hand of Government distorting markets” … Ok, let me concede that they may have at least one valid point: namely that when the Government does intervene, it does so to save the butts of the Atlases who got us into the mess in the first place, a textbook illustration of moral harzard.

The odd honest mainstream economists have recognized this, none more stridently than the indefatigable Nouriel Roubini who called it “the transformation of the USA into the USSRA (United Socialist State Republic of America)” – socialism for the Rich, that is. Even Roubini is wrong on this though – the EE has always employed this tactic, regardless of what they preach, see for instance George Monbiot.

The more moderate crowd has now rediscovered the virtues of the theories of Hyman Minsky, see for example, Martin Wolf’s Financial Times columns.

Minsky was right. A long period of rapid growth, low inflation, low interest rates and macroeconomic stability bred complacency and increased willingness to take risk. Stability led to instability. Innovation – securitisation, off-balance-sheet financing and the rest – has, as always, proved a big part of the story.

This was part of Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis, in sharp contrast to the mainstream economist’s dreamland Efficient market Hypothesis. Minsky, a staunch Keynesian maintained that there was “nothing wrong with economics that a good depression couldn’t cure”.

Minsky undoubtedly got many things right about how finance behaves, but is it true that finance is the only trouble spot? Not according to the Marxists, who of course are not even given a hearing because they’re supposedly famous for “predicting five out of the last three recessions”. Well, anyway, here is Financial Crisis 101 and here is a more elaborate analysis both out and out Marxist. Judge for yourselves! (Do you detect something in common with what you read on Roubini these days?)

Allow me to disagree. A Sokal-type hoax is an
aggression which should only be carried out when
absolutely necessary, i.e. when a discipline is
so desperately out of touch with reality that some
brutality is needed in waking it up. This was the
case with the postmodernist sociology of science school
at the time of Sokal's hoax, but I see nothing remotely
like that in today's behavioral economics.

He continued:

Understanding human nature is a deep, difficult and truly
important project - so much so that we need many different
disciplines to attempt it from different points of view.

I agree completely with this last sentiment, but I wonder: what does Behavioural Economics do for this?

In the technical literature, one can already find many complaints about the experimental practices and standards of rigour of behavioural economists, see for example Ariel Rubinstein’s discussion of behavioural economics and the references therein.

But, more generally, let us consider a typical behavioural economics experiment and the inferences drawn from it. One of the more provocative ones from Ariely’s book is asking people to make investment decisions normally, and when masturbating. The conclusion: we are more risky in the state of mind during or after masturbating …

Volumes of economics journals are being filled these days with such experiments (perhaps not always so dramatic) to infer the so-called “insights” of behavioural economics:

• We are not always fully rational in our actions (this goes under the fancy slogan “bounded rationality”)
• We do not always act to maximize selfish utility.
• We often cooperate when we have confidence that the other person will also ..

Wow! What a revelation!

The only possible group I can think of for whom such experiments and “insights” are news is the mainstream neo-classical economists who lay ritual tributes at the altar of maximizing self interest i.e. the group that made up the totally fanciful assumptions in the first place!

If we give them the benefit of doubt, and treat behavioural economics as an essential correction or criticism of the standard model, then it is a very weak one. Much better are the solidly grounded empirical studies of Ha-Joon Chang reviewed here in a previous post that utterly expose the vacuity and falsity of the model.

A last thought that crosses my mind is this: could it be that behavioural economics to neo-liberal economics what “intelligent design” is to creationism?

Once upon a time, the leading car-maker of a developing country exported its first passenger cars to the US. Until then, the company had only made poor copies of cars made by richer countries. The car was just a cheap subcompact (“four wheels and an ashtray”) but it was a big moment for the country and its exporters felt proud.

Unfortunately, the car failed. Most people thought it looked lousy, and were reluctant to spend serious money on a family car that came from a place where only second-rate products were made. The car had to be withdrawn from the US. This disaster led to a major debate among the country’s citizens. Many argued that the company should have stuck to its original business of making simple textile machinery. After all, the country’s biggest export item was silk. If the company could not make decent cars after 25 years of trying, there was no future for it. The government had given the car-maker every chance. It had ensured high profits for it through high tariffs and tough controls on foreign investment. Less than ten years earlier, it had even given public money to save the company from bankruptcy. So, the critics argued, foreign cars should now be let in freely and foreign car-makers, who had been kicked out 20 years before, allowed back again. Others disagreed. They argued that no country had ever got anywhere without developing “serious” industries like car production. They just needed more time.

The year was 1958 and the country was Japan. The company was Toyota, and the car was called the Toyopet. Toyota started out as a manufacturer of textile machinery and moved into car production in 1933. The Japanese government kicked out General Motors and Ford in 1939, and bailed out Toyota with money from the central bank in 1949. Today, Japanese cars are considered as “natural” as Scottish salmon or French wine, but less than 50 years ago, most people, including many Japanese, thought the Japanese car industry simply should not exist.

Half a century after the Toyopet debacle, Toyota’s luxury brand Lexus has become an icon of globalisation, thanks to the American journalist Thomas Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree. The book owes its title to an epiphany that Friedman had in Japan in 1992. He had paid a visit to a Lexus factory, which deeply impressed him. On the bullet train back to Tokyo, he read yet another newspaper article about the troubles in the middle east, where he had been a correspondent. Then it hit him. He realised that “half the world seemed to be… intent on building a better Lexus, dedicated to modernising, streamlining and privatising their economies in order to thrive in the system of globalisation. And half of the world—sometimes half the same country, sometimes half the same person—was still caught up in the fight over who owns which olive tree.”

According to Friedman, countries in the olive-tree world will not be able to join the Lexus world unless they fit themselves into a particular set of economic policies he calls “the golden straitjacket.” In describing the golden straitjacket, Friedman pretty much sums up today’s neoliberal orthodoxy: countries should privatise state-owned enterprises, maintain low inflation, reduce the size of government, balance the budget, liberalise trade, deregulate foreign investment and capital markets, make the currency convertible, reduce corruption and privatise pensions. The golden straitjacket, Friedman argues, is the only clothing suitable for the harsh but exhilarating game of globalisation.

However, had the Japanese government followed the free-trade economists back in the early 1960s, there would have been no Lexus. Toyota today would at best be a junior partner to a western car manufacturer and Japan would have remained the third-rate industrial power it was in the 1960s—on the same level as Chile, Argentina and South Africa.

Had it just been Japan that became rich through the heretical policies of protection, subsidies and the restriction of foreign investment, the free-market champions might be able to dismiss it as the exception that proves the rule. But Japan is no exception. Practically all of today’s developed countries, including Britain and the US, the supposed homes of the free market and free trade, have become rich on the basis of policy recipes that contradict today’s orthodoxy.

Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang’s book Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and The Threat to Global Prosperity (Random House 2007) is an amazing demolition job on the neo-liberal orthodoxy, with a chapter devoted to exposing each mantra:

• Protectionism is bad for economic growth (The US and Britain were the most protectionist of nations when they were growing.).
• Free Trade is the only way to grow rich (The US and Britain had some of the highest tarrifs on imports).
• Foreign investment should not be regulated (The US imposed severe controls on foreign investment, Japan banned them altogether).
• Private enterprise is good, public enterprise bad (Large numbers of world class companies developed as state owned enterprises, some still are).
• IProtecting intellectual propert rights is essential for innovation and growth (In most countries, including Britain, Austria, France and the US, patenting of imported inventions was explicitly allowed in the 19th century.)
• Financial discipline is essential for growth, in particular inflation must be kept below 5 %. (Korea had 17 % inflation during periods of strogest growth).
• Corrupt and undemocratic governments are responsible for poverty (The great push for growth in Korea was under the dictatorship of Gen. Park).
• Some cultures are intrinsically incapable of growth (Korea and Japan were considered to be such!)

In other words, the policies rich nations are thrusting down the throats of poor ones today are the exact opposite of those they followed to get rich! There is an interesting exchange between Ha-Joon Chang and the neoliberals . While Martin Wolf is at least respectful and has read the book, the arrogance of the neo-liberal stalwarts who have clearly not even turned a page is astonishing!

At the end, the neoiberals are reduced to look like a pack of utter idiots. The truth is quite the opposite – these are among the finest, devilishly clever minds around. So if they advocate the neo-liberal line, it could hardly be out of ignorance of their consequences as Chang suggests at some points. At other places Chang comes closer when he talks of rich nations pursuing their own interests. But this is still not the correct diagnosis, for these policies have their admirers in poor countries too …

U.Alon, An Introduction to Systems Biology:Design Principles of Biological Circuits Chapman and Hall/CRC 2007

Biology is complicated but there are simple underlying principles: this is the message of Uri Alon’s timely book giving an introduction to Systems Biology. In this he is following in a distinguished tradition of the rationalization of Biology starting with the molecular revolution, the defining Watson-Crick moment, and continuing in the forceful popular expositions of Richard Dawkins.

Alon is a physicist by training and this reflects in his approach: using the art of “toy models” to capture something of essence about a system (more on this below). In a series of chapters he demonstrates the success of this approach.

The first part of the book is devoted to exploring regulatory network motifs. Consider the graph whose nodes are genes and edges represent regulatory interactions for instance the protein coded for by one gene activates or represses the gene for producing another protein. A motif is a subgraph in this network that is significantly overrepresented statistically, as compared to a random network. The hypothesis is that such a significantly over-represented subgraph cannot occur by chance but must have evolved by selective pressure.Hence it must serve some definite crucial function-. Alon examines a number of such motifs exploring their dynamics through simple ordinary differential equation models. Amazingly, one discovers this way, that a number of familiar engineering principles are implemented via these motifs. For example, control theorists use the concept of integral feedback to maintain stability of systems such as heat controllers, and – lo and behold! – the same principle is operating in biological systems!

In the second part of the book, Alon concentrates o one of the most important and remarkable properties of biological systems, namely their robustness i.e. ability to adapt successfully and reliably to many different situations. He illustrates a number of principles of robust design , again using quantitative toy models. A beautiful example he uses is, for instance to ask the question:which genes have positive regulation and which negative? And is there a good reason for the choice?

One misgiving I have is about how biologists would take to these toy models, especially once the going gets somewhat more difficult. To his credit, Alon never needs much beyond the simplest differential equations, but even this, I fear, may be outside the remit of a typical biologist today.

A solution I propose, as a computer scientist, is to use one of the many simulation and modelling tools available today, to shield the biological student from the daunting differential equations. At least for a start, one could build the toy model in such a system with the underlying mathematics hidden and allow the user to play around and experiment with the model, thus aining an understanding of its properties. At a later stage, the hood may be opened for those who dare, to reveal the underlying model. Another advantage is that this way, one can use different kinds of underlying models either deterministic and stochastic, and see the differences in behaviour, which are sometimes significant.

But the greatest advantage of this approach is that it brings to bear the more powerful and flexible computational approaches on investigating biological models. Toy models are great to understand principles and Alon is happy to point out that all the models in the book can be solved on the blackboard or on a small piece of paper but this is really the exception than the rule – even the simplest of toy models can sometimes be forbiddingly difficult to analyse precisely using ODEs. Computational tools can thus greatly expand the scope of use of toy models.

Biology may be complicated but I fear there is no hope for us to understand it unless we take the stand that Alon advocates and demonstrates so successfully in this book: that there are simple underlying principles of design.

The event began with corruption and human institutions and ended with climate change, with biology, psychology and linguistics in between!

The kickoff talk was by Bo Rothstein, a very well known personality in Sweden for his apparently unlimited access to the comment and viewpoint pages of the leading Swedish dailies such as Dagens Nyheter and Goteborgs Posten. Rothstein’s questions are very interesting ones. First, how do institutions develop that lead to a non-corrupt society, for example, Sweden today? The question becomes even more interesting when one discovers that Sweden was just as corrupt as other places in Europe not so long ago in history. The answer is probably some very complex combination of historical, cultural and religious factors. What could mathematical or computational modelling have to contribute to understanding this question? I really don’t know. Rothstein’s second question was: when corruption is the norm, it takes very different forms – why? I must confess to being puzzled by this question – given the very different cultural, historical and other settings in places like Nigeria, Naples or India, one would naturally expect corruption there to exhibit very different features as a rule. Why should it be surprising? One would be surprised if exactly the same type of corruption arose in these very different kinds of places, and that would need explanation! Rothstein showed us emails he exchanged with a leading game theorist asking why corruption takes very different forms, and the answer was essentially, “good question!”.

The final talk by Olof Johansson Stenman was entitled “Behavioural Economics Insights Applied to Climate Change”. What are the insights from behavioural economics? That people don’t always make decisions fully rationally, that they do not make them entirely motivated by material self interest, that they often cooperate only conditionally i.e. provided the others do too, and that they respond to rewards and punishments. I confess wondering if one should churn out dozens of experimental studies and sizable journal papers to arrive at these insights, but perhaps they serve a purpose in a discipline where ritual sacrifices are offered routinely at the altar of self interest. As for the application to climate change, this translated essentially into the prescription that one should punish the defectors from the collective agreement. All very well said, but who is going to punish the greatest culprit – the EE? Sanctions were mentioned.Well, the EE is great at threatening and imposing sanctions on others, but who is going to impose sanctions on the EE? A proposal by Stiglitz was mentioned about imposing trade sanctions on the EE. Once again, sounds good on paper, but who is going to impose the trade sanctions? The EU? Or China? They would shoot themselves in their own legs? In the end, the most depressing thing about combating climate change is the EE – who won’t even sign a very weak and non-binding agreement like Kyoto, what hope for a serious binding and drastic treaty that is required? There is some hope though, because with the exit of the Coward government in Australia, the coalition of the unwilling has been reduced to essentially one.

The highlight of the event for me was the talk by Olof Leimar which showed that while we humans run hopeless contortions around social dilemmas, animals appear to solve it effortlessly, demonstrated beautifully with the example of the cleaner fish.

Although, as hinted above, I am sceptical about what Math and CS can contribute to some grand questions from social science, I do hope that this event will initiate more collaboration between CS, Math and other disciplines in the social sciences. Life buried in Math and CS internals can be monastic and at some point at least, a bit uninteresting, whereas such interactions could make us, to use a phrase that was hammered at me growing up in India, “healthy, wealthy and wise”!

First, one should not generalise by ethnicities, nationalities, race … etc. Of course I agree. Indeed I am bugged most by this personally when people start typecasting me with traits they claim are Indian. My response is an agitated: “Hey! Whether or not x may be an Indian trait, you have to judge me by what I say or do!”. So obviously I shouldn’t be accusing anyone of going this or that based on the fact that they’re Swedes! Individuals are different, and they are responsible for their own thoughts and actions, not those of others.

Second, I am often incensed at comments made about India (for example in recent meetings in the new fever of Indo-Swedish samarbete) by people who have no clue. Obviously, it takes a while to understand the norms and mores of a country, and to pass judgements without doing so is the height of ignorant condescension. So, by the same token, I shouldn’t go around spouting wisdom on Swedish ways without having understood them correctly.

That said, I do believe some stereotypes are true! Or, at least have a grain of truth about them. And, second, it sometimes requires a foreigner’s eyes to spot something that is invisible to the locals.

In my offending blogs I made two related claims: first that Swedes have a tendency to be defer-rant to authority, that of the Government say, or to that conferred by a position or status. Second, that Swedes are infected by “coursophilia” – to attach too high an importance to formal courses and points as a way of judging competence.

Now, following (very briefly and superficially), David Sloan Wilson’s adage to view everything in the light of Evolution for Everyone, there may be good reasons fo these memes to have set in. After all, Swedish Governments, for eaxmple, have long been models of unsurpassed integrity and honesty, and the Swedish education system has similarly worked marvels in creating the present state of society. So there may be very good reasons for the deference to authority and coursophilia.

But, there is also the danger that it can be misused and exploited …

I went to the discussion hoping to make what I thought was a rather uncontroversial point: that a university like Chalmers, which aspires to class itself as among the best in the world, should adopt a flexible and multi-faceted approach in deciding on “pedagogic competence” among its staff, new and existing. In particular, pedagogic courses could be one of several criteria, but they should not necessarily be mandatory.

How wrong and naive I was! The discussion started with claims about how Chalmers has higher requirements for pedagogic excellence than other places, which turns out to consist of insisting on the requirement of pedagogic courses, and the discussion never seemed to get away from this point.

Rhetorical arguments were presented of the following form: suppose I was looking to appoint someone to teach algorithms at Chalmers – would I accept someone who had 20 years working at Ericsson as a programmer who had no formal qualifications to teach algorithms? Well, let’s consider this a bit more carefully. Suppose A has worked 10 years at Ericsson in a strong research group working with networking algorithms. A has been active on the international scene, presenting cutting edge research at premier algorithms conferences. A has taught courses as a guest lecturer at Chalmers and KTH in algorithms, been in demand for giving summer courses at international schools on algorithms … However he doesn’t have something that B has: namely a pedagogical certificate pinned to the wall asserting competence in teaching algorithms. Moreover, B has no research record at the international level, has never taught at Chalmers or KTH , Lund or Uppsala … and never even heard of international summer schools in algorithms.

At the trial lecture, B proceeds in a very “pedagogic” fashion: he has neat powerpoint slides one labelled “Introduction”, the final one labelled “Summary and Conclusions” and in between a slide for “Greedy Algorithms”, “Dynamic programming” and “Divide and Conquer” with textbook examples of toy problems. A on the other hand, begins with a real problem that Ericksson had to solve in its mobile networks and starts by challenging the audience to offer solutions. Then he proceeds to illustrate how the problem could be approached with different strategies, their respective strengths and weaknesses, false turns, errors … and finally the solution (all with non Microsoft crap, to top it all!).

Who should one hire at Chalmers? No brainer you say? You’re right: by Chalmers high standards of pedagogic excellence, we would disqualify A for not having the competence to teach and hire B!

Time to make yet another of my bold sweeping invandrare claims about Swedes. First a clarification of my motivations. Like most other invandrare, I recognise that compared to most other places – foremost India, but also the EE for example – Sweden is, in general, a very enlightened and progressive place where reason, integrity and harmony hold sway. Thus it is all the more frustrating for an invandrare that when they are so reasonable about most things, how could they possibly be so stupid about others? For example, “coursophilia“: to be considered competent in something, you must have certificates and points from courses – pedagogic courses! – otherwise you’re incompetent to discuss the subject. Thus:

Noam Chomsky shouldn’t write about politics

Jared Diamond shouldn’t write about history and societies

Olle Häggström shouldn’t write about climate change …

Because none of them have taken 101 courses on the subject, nor courses on how to write … hence are incompetent on those respective topics, no matter how much independent reading and research they may have done, no matter what their experience and track record is, and no matter how insightful and accurate their arguments may be. (Evidence for my claim: I’ve explicitly been asked about the claims listed above, and other invandrare strikingly had similar experiences. Counterexamples: three people from my own Dept. who made outstanding presentations against the pedagogy course requirements.)

There was also an interesting bootstrapping argument: Chalmers should insist on pedagogic course requirements because other universities  – in Sweden! – are doing so. Thus, people at D&IT shouldn’t end up at a disadvantage when they apply to other places in Sweden and are required to show their pedagogy course points … Meanwhile these universities of course are probably using the same argument in reverse to enforec their pedagogic course requirements. A beautiful self-reinforcing – mutually recursive as CS people would say – circle.

So it seems to be a long and hard battle ahead to get Chalmers to think outside of this framework of courses and points in judging pedagogical competence. One thought that occurred to me – fleetingly – was to compile a list of the world’s leading universities that are universally acknowledged to achieve the highest standards in research and teaching excellence – MIT, Stanford, Oxford , Cambridge … – and document how they evaluate competence, in particular that they do not have pedagogic courses as mandatory requirements. But then Chalmers will merely take that as definitive proof that we have higher standards of excellence!

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin 2007 (Swedish edition Ordfront 2007)

“Free Market” = Democracy, Freedom, Peace, Prosperity …

is supposed to be the equation of the zeitgeist. But, as Naomi Klein demonstrates in this book, her latest and by far the best, the truth is just the opposite, namely the title of this blog!

Klein demonstrates this by an enlightening survey of the economic history of the last 50 years which has seen the world increasingly gripped by the tentacles of “free market” fundamentalism.

The Shock Doctrine begins with a literal story of shock treatment by the Canadian doctor Ewen Cameron at McGill University, research sponsored by – who else? – the CIA! Cameron’s theory was that once “complete depatterning” had been achieved, the patients could be reprogrammed as desired. Klein intends to use this as a metaphor for how the “free market” ideology has proceeded time and again. This story is certainly revealing in showing that torture is as American as apple pie, so Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are worthy successors to a long tradition. However, for Klein’s main story, this shock treatment of her own is in danger of claiming her as the first victim, for it opens the door to “conspiracy theory” attacks. Indeed this is what two recent reviews – one by the Nobel prize winning economist turned public intellectual, Joseph Stoiglitz and the other in LRB – have picked on, while being otherwise appreciative of the book’s merits.

From Chile and Argentina to Iraq and Palestine, the “War on Terror” and back home in Katrina ravaged New Orleans, Klein paints a rich description of how catastrophes, natural and man made – have been the shock used to force unsavoury policies down the throats of unwilling victims.

A lot of this is done under the rhetoric of “free market” fundamentalism. The LRB reviewer takes Klein to task for not distinguishing between the “free market” ideas themselves and corporate misbehaviour. What he doesn’t seem to get is that the louder the proclamations are made about “free markets”, the easier it becomes to see that the use of the term has very little to do with the fantasises set out in Econ 101 textbooks.

One common pattern is the repeated appearance of Chicago school economists at the key points in these acts. “Conspiracy Theory” or just a coincidence? Are economists just disinterested scientists seeking the truth? Well, as Stiglitz writes, the economic policies being pushed “were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets”. Reading Klein’s book makes it clear that while Marx it may have been who uttered the famous line that “philosophers have only studied the world, the point however is to change it”, the ones who have taken it seriously and successfully are the Chicago Boys of Milton Friedman.

“I have never seen Francis in a modest mood”, so begins the first line in James Watson’s account of the momentous discovery of The Double Helix for which he shared the Nobel prize with Francis Crick in 1962. Indeed the entire scientific life of Francis Crick is a tale of immodesty: first the structure of the DNA, then the genetic code and finally neuroscience and consciousness.

Yet, the beginning could hardly have been more different. Known in school as a moderately clever but distracted kid, Crick soon acquired a reputation for someone who just talked a lot – very loudly at that – and never managed to finish anything satisfactorily. His real scientific career started very late, when he was over 30 and the discovery of DNA structure came when he was 37.

The decisive influence that started and then continued to shape his scientific career seems to have been the presence of the other. All his major discoveries were made in partnerships with a partner who could serve as a sounding board for ideas. First was George Kriesel, an eccentric Austrian logician who specialised, among other things, in making random proposals to women on the Riviera, see Kreiselinana . From Kreisel, he learned how to organise his thoughts precisely and logically. Next was Watson with whom he developed an instant rapport. One of the best administrative decisions his bosses at Cambridge made was to put the two together into a room where they could talk loudly and endlessly. Then later it was Sydney Brenner with whom Crick cracked the genetic code and finally in the last 18 years, an unfulfilled quest for understanding consciousness with Christof Koch.

Crick’s approach to doing science is a great way to debunk common public parodies. The scientist is depicted as careful and stodgy, collecting fact after fact, and refusing to speculate wildly. Exactly the opposite of Crick! Time after time, Crick tossed up idea and hypotheses out of nowhere, with not an ounce of evidence in support. The best example of this is probably the paper “On Protein Synthesis” from 1957 in which he made a set of bold assertions each depending on one another: the function of genes is to make proteins, there are 20 kinds of amino acids in proteins, and all occur in nearly all proteins, whatever the species or organisms … all guesses, and all, as later turned out outrageously, correct! The most remarkable part of the paper were the two general principles Crick set forth:

My own thinking is based on two general principles, which I shall call the Sequence Hypothesis and the Central Dogma. The direct evidence for them both is negligible, but I have found them to be of great help in coming to grips with … very complex problems.

The “Sequence Hypothesis” states that a sequence of bases determines a amino acid and nothing else is needed to tell a protein how to fold. This was complete heresy at the time, later a fundamental surprise of molecular biology, but just standard bioinformatics today. The “Central Dogma” in original form was:

Once “information” has passed into protein, it cannot get out again … the transfer of information from nucleic acid to nucleic acid or from nucleic acid to protein may be possible, but the transfer from protein to protein or from protein to nucleic acid is impossible.

Today, this is again,a central tenet in molecular biology, namely that information passes uni directionally, from DNA to RNA to proteins.

The common parody of the fact-addicted cautious scientist fits much better, Rosalind Franklin , the crystallographer and contemporary at King’s College who had important data, but refused to speculate on it, possibly denying her a proper share of the discovery of the double helix.

There is a beautiful vignette for computer scientists, during a visit by Francois Jacob, one half of the great French team with Jacques Monod. Monod and Jacob had done some experiments that seemed to decisively refute Crick’s assertions about protein synthesis: when new genes were introduced, proteins were synthesised far too quickly for there to be time to build up new ribosomes as Crick’s theory seemed to require. During Jacob’s talk, suddenly Brenner let out a yelp and started talking very fast, and in response, so did Crick. They had seen the solution! And the solution came from Brenner recalling a paper he had studied several years ago by the great Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann on the design of self-reproducing automata. There von Neumann had laid out the basic principle of computer architecture: that the “tape” which held information or instructions was separate from the “tape reader” that interpreted or executed those instructions. This was precisely what the ribosomes were: they merely read the instructions carried to them by messenger RNA and executed them to synthesise the proteins!

On ecan’t but speculate that Crick would have loved to stay a bit longer as the field of Systems Biology takes shape and starts addressing some of the problems in neuroscience he was obssessed with at the end.  In particular, his speculations on the claustrum and his highly connected structure sound straight out of recent network biology!

Finally, science funders have lessons to learn from the career of Francis Crick, especially the early days with Watson. Crick and Watson were commonly regarded as ignorant fools with no background in the area, meddling in things far beyond their ken, hoping futilely to compete with luminaries like Linus Pauling. They were constantly straying from their assigned tasks for which their positions were funded, and never did their reports etc on time. Thank God for science!

Matt Ridley has proved yet again, that he is much better at writing wonderful popular science books than at running banks.