Out of the box thinking
05/04/14 05:25
One of the podcasts that I have been listening to for several years now is Radiolab, produced by WNYC. The show’s hosts us a good deal of sound editing to produce engaging shows pn a wide variety of subjects. They tend toward slightly geeky science stories, on-air experiments and other interesting topics. Most of my reading doesn’t get too close to science. I read a lot of theology and philosophy and enjoy keeping up with fiction and poetry. I read some books of psychology and other scientific topics, but I rely upon other media to keep me informed about what is going on in the world of science. Another podcast that I check out weekly is The Naked Scientists from BBC. Despite its name that reflects that British sense of humor the show is a careful attempt to take the cutting edge of science and present it in a way that laypersons can understand.
Like my reading, I get behind in the podcasts. I tend to listen to podcasts when I am driving, but also listen when I am doing some mindless tasks such as folding brochures or collating documents. Since I get behind, I will occasionally go several weeks without listening to a particular podcast and then listen to three or four shows at a time, back-to-back.
So I am not sure whether it was Radiolab or The Naked Scientists, but one of the podcasts I was listening to recently had a story about the ways that scientists are working to halt the spread of malaria. This devastating disease seems to travel from human to human by mosquitos who are carriers of the disease. So, in addition to developing strategies to treat malaria and medicines to prevent it, the battle against the disease has focused on getting rid of mosquitoes. Much money and many pesticides have been consumed in the effort to eradicate mosquitoes. The problem is that so far that approach almost works, but the operative word is “almost.” There are parts of the world where the mosquitos persist despite significant efforts at eradicating them. The research into mosquitos has intensified in the fact of tother mosquito borne diseases such as West Nile Virus.
The show presented three possible strategies that seem to me to be pretty far “out of the box.” The first was to work on genetic modifications to the mosquitoes that make them immune to the diseases. Apparently mosquitoes have to become infected with malaria in order to transmit the disease. So if you figure out how to make a mosquito immune to the disease, it will no longer carry it from human to human. It sort of seems to me that if you could make a mosquito immune to the disease, you might also be able to make a human being immune, which might work even better.
The second strategy presented in the program is to figure out how to shorten the lifespan of the mosquito. It seems that after the mosquito bites the infected person, the virus has to incubate in the mosquito for five or six days before it is potent enough to infect a human being. That means that the mosquito bite that transmits the virus comes near the end of the life of the mosquito. Since mosquitos normall live seven or eight days, shortening their lifespan to five or six days means that they cannot transmit the virus. Scientists have discovered a fungus that will do the trick. Mosquitoes that have the fungus can bite someone who has malaria but don’t live long enough to transmit it to another human being. I’m not sure, but I suspect that infecting all of the mosquitoes in the world with the fungus might be more difficult than killing all of the mosquitoes - and so far that strategy hasn’t worked perfectly.
The third strategy was the most out-of-the-box in my opinion. It was to impact the evolution of mosquitos so that they become creatures that never bite humans. The tongue-in-cheek radio show suggested that we need to be vigilant in killing so many for each time that a bite is delivered, they might alter their strategy of survival. If I remember right this strategy requires killing hundreds of mosquitos for every bite and takes about thirty thousand human generations to be successful.
Scientists, of course, operate in a world where there are many ideas that don’t work. They follow a hunch and a hunch becomes a theory and a theory is either disproven or proven. Disproven theories are as valuable to the advancement of science as the ones that work out the way that they were envisioned. One of the things I like about the scientific method is that it values mistakes and celebrates failure. As long as the scientists keep pushing the edges of knowledge and discovery it doesn’t matter if they learn from success or from failure. You don’t have to always be right to be a good scientist.
It is a quality that we theologians might benefit from imitating. We have a tendency to be pretty harsh of those who make errors in judgment or whose understanding of history and heritage is incomplete. We tend to dismiss those whose ideas are too far out of the box.
Out of the box thinking is only one quality about scientists that I admire. I also appreciate the fact that some scientists are able to take a very long-term view of time. We can laugh about a solution to mosquitos and malaria that takes 130 generations, but the truth is that our faith and our relationship with God is a multi-generational process. It took generations for our people to understand the very basics of the nature of God. It will take many more generations for us to unpack the mystery of human nature. A complete Christology requires a complete understanding fo both God and humans. It simply is an intellectual task that is beyond a single generation. We won’t get there in my lifetime.
Even though I don’t fully understand the science programs that I hear, I still have much to learn from the scientists.
It sort of makes me wonder how many scientists listen to religion podcasts. Do you suppose that some of the best out of the box thinking in science comes from scientists who listen to On Being?
Like my reading, I get behind in the podcasts. I tend to listen to podcasts when I am driving, but also listen when I am doing some mindless tasks such as folding brochures or collating documents. Since I get behind, I will occasionally go several weeks without listening to a particular podcast and then listen to three or four shows at a time, back-to-back.
So I am not sure whether it was Radiolab or The Naked Scientists, but one of the podcasts I was listening to recently had a story about the ways that scientists are working to halt the spread of malaria. This devastating disease seems to travel from human to human by mosquitos who are carriers of the disease. So, in addition to developing strategies to treat malaria and medicines to prevent it, the battle against the disease has focused on getting rid of mosquitoes. Much money and many pesticides have been consumed in the effort to eradicate mosquitoes. The problem is that so far that approach almost works, but the operative word is “almost.” There are parts of the world where the mosquitos persist despite significant efforts at eradicating them. The research into mosquitos has intensified in the fact of tother mosquito borne diseases such as West Nile Virus.
The show presented three possible strategies that seem to me to be pretty far “out of the box.” The first was to work on genetic modifications to the mosquitoes that make them immune to the diseases. Apparently mosquitoes have to become infected with malaria in order to transmit the disease. So if you figure out how to make a mosquito immune to the disease, it will no longer carry it from human to human. It sort of seems to me that if you could make a mosquito immune to the disease, you might also be able to make a human being immune, which might work even better.
The second strategy presented in the program is to figure out how to shorten the lifespan of the mosquito. It seems that after the mosquito bites the infected person, the virus has to incubate in the mosquito for five or six days before it is potent enough to infect a human being. That means that the mosquito bite that transmits the virus comes near the end of the life of the mosquito. Since mosquitos normall live seven or eight days, shortening their lifespan to five or six days means that they cannot transmit the virus. Scientists have discovered a fungus that will do the trick. Mosquitoes that have the fungus can bite someone who has malaria but don’t live long enough to transmit it to another human being. I’m not sure, but I suspect that infecting all of the mosquitoes in the world with the fungus might be more difficult than killing all of the mosquitoes - and so far that strategy hasn’t worked perfectly.
The third strategy was the most out-of-the-box in my opinion. It was to impact the evolution of mosquitos so that they become creatures that never bite humans. The tongue-in-cheek radio show suggested that we need to be vigilant in killing so many for each time that a bite is delivered, they might alter their strategy of survival. If I remember right this strategy requires killing hundreds of mosquitos for every bite and takes about thirty thousand human generations to be successful.
Scientists, of course, operate in a world where there are many ideas that don’t work. They follow a hunch and a hunch becomes a theory and a theory is either disproven or proven. Disproven theories are as valuable to the advancement of science as the ones that work out the way that they were envisioned. One of the things I like about the scientific method is that it values mistakes and celebrates failure. As long as the scientists keep pushing the edges of knowledge and discovery it doesn’t matter if they learn from success or from failure. You don’t have to always be right to be a good scientist.
It is a quality that we theologians might benefit from imitating. We have a tendency to be pretty harsh of those who make errors in judgment or whose understanding of history and heritage is incomplete. We tend to dismiss those whose ideas are too far out of the box.
Out of the box thinking is only one quality about scientists that I admire. I also appreciate the fact that some scientists are able to take a very long-term view of time. We can laugh about a solution to mosquitos and malaria that takes 130 generations, but the truth is that our faith and our relationship with God is a multi-generational process. It took generations for our people to understand the very basics of the nature of God. It will take many more generations for us to unpack the mystery of human nature. A complete Christology requires a complete understanding fo both God and humans. It simply is an intellectual task that is beyond a single generation. We won’t get there in my lifetime.
Even though I don’t fully understand the science programs that I hear, I still have much to learn from the scientists.
It sort of makes me wonder how many scientists listen to religion podcasts. Do you suppose that some of the best out of the box thinking in science comes from scientists who listen to On Being?