If you work in toxicology or drug discovery, you might be familiar with the database Open TG-GATEs, a large transcriptomics database that catalogues gene expression response to well-known drugs and toxins. This database was developed by Japan’s Toxicogenomics Project during many years, as a private-public sector partnership, and remains a very valuable resource. As with […]
At first glance, Hubert Dreyfus’ 1992 book What Computers Still Can’t Do (WCSCD, originally published in 1972 as What Computers Can’t Do) seems untimely in the current business climate, which favours massive and widespread investment in AI (these days, often understood as being synonymous with machine learning and neural networks). However, being untimely may in fact […]
Two momentous events that took place last year were the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, and the UK’s referendum on EU membership that led to the “Brexit†decision to leave the union. The two are often lumped together and seen as symptoms of a single larger force, which they probably […]
In contemporary society, we make use of the notion that things may be synthetic. Thus we may speak of synthetic biology, “synthesizers” (synthetic sound), synthetic textile etc. Such things are supposed to be artificial and not come from “nature”. However, the Greek root of the word synthesis actually seems to refer to the conjoining of […]
Humans primarily live in a world of beings, each of which has meaning. Meaningful beings appear to us interconnected, referencing practices and other beings in a referential totality. Buttons suggest pushing, chairs suggest sitting, a tractor suggests farming. A (Japanese) rice paddy may suggest the heavy labour that goes into the rice harvest each year, […]