Nourishing Innovation: Open Science and Federal Support
Following on last week’s post about the NIH and English as the Language of Science, I have another selection from Arthur Kornberg’s book For the Love of Enzymes to highlight.
Essentially, Kornberg is describing the critical elements in the relationship between scientists, industry, and innovation (page 294):
One critical ingredient must be provided by industrial management if it wishes to capture and retain creative and productive scientists. It must provide an open atmosphere which encourages the scientist to discuss ideas, progress, and failures with colleagues in and out of his organization and to publish without restraint. Such an atmosphere is conductive to a flow of students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting professors through the company.


What is this thing called ‘Life?’ One popular game in the relevant area of philosophy is to provide robust counter examples, which reveal failures in operational definitions of life. Failed attempts include physiological, metabolic, biochemical, genetic and thermodynamic definitions of life, all of which face problems. For example, a metabolic definition finds it hard to exclude fire (which grows and reproduces via chemical reactions), a biochemical definition does not exclude enzymes (which are biologically functional but not living systems), while a thermodynamic definition does not exclude mineral crystals (which create and sustain local order and may reproduce).
Leading scientists in a variety of fields gave their 
