The Technology 202: Walter Isaacson says new discoveries will come from people who appreciate ‘microchips and molecules’

Isaacson believes the CRISPR discovery will kick-start the next great innovation revolution. But Isaacson — well known for chronicling tech inventors ranging from Ada Lovelace to Steve Jobs — doesn’t think gene editing will supersede the age of the microchip and computers. 

“The next great wave of discoveries will come from the connection of the digital revolution with the life sciences revolution,” Isaacson told me in an interview. “It will come from using artificial intelligence and data analytics on things like cancer and coronavirus. The future will belong to those who can appreciate both microchips and molecules, and connect that to the humanities.” 

Isaacson and I spoke over the phone this week about his new book, and its connections to his previous work chronicling the tech industry. Here’s our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity:

Tech 202: The tech industry grew for years without a reckoning over the moral consequences of its products. It obviously seems to be happening much sooner in this field. Are there lessons that biologists can learn from the recent challenges in tech? 

Yes. It goes back to Albert Einstein being informed one day that they had dropped an atom bomb, and he becomes part of a group of scientists who say we have to figure out how to put this genie back in the bottle. 

As for digital technology, we created algorithms of social media that amplify outrage without thinking through the consequences, and we allowed social media platforms to avoid responsibility for what happened on their platforms. 

Jennifer Doudna and Eric Lander, both of whom have been involved in thinking through these new biotech tools, have realized that it’s important to deal with it before the gene editing technology gets released into this world. I’m encouraged that Dr. Lander is going to be Biden’s scientific adviser, because whether it’s on privacy issues surrounding medicine or the use of genetic editing, he’s been at the forefront. 

Tech 202: You’ve written about the obstacles that female inventors face. How do you think the challenges that Doudna faced in biology compare to the challenges faced by women in Silicon Valley? 

In the tech industry, there’s a problem of a lack of diversity — of gender, of race and many other ways. In the biotech revolution, the gender issue is not as bad. In fact, 60 percent of undergraduate and graduate students studying biology today are women. But there is a diversity issue when I go to the labs and look down the benches, I don’t see a lot of Blacks or other minorities. And I think it’s important because these issues dealing with human life have such implications. It’s critically important that we increase the diversity of those who are involved in the biotech revolution.  

If we start editing our genes, we might end up reducing the amount of diversity in our society, which would be horrible for the colorful, wondrous nature of the human species and also for the resilience of the human species. We need to make sure those involved in this revolution come from very diverse backgrounds. 

Tech 202: You write that the CRISPR conferences you attended before the pandemic felt like the computing conferences in the 1970s. Can you tell me a bit more about those similarities? 

People like Steve Jobs were the cool kids and helping lead a revolution. People felt like they were part of an exciting new movement. 

When I went to the CRISPR conference and other biotech gatherings, I realized there’s that same spirit among young entrepreneurs and researchers who are in the vanguard of the biotech revolution. They’re exciting to be around. 

Tech 202: In 2020, many of the conferences were happening on Zoom and Slack. How is the age of Zoom affecting scientific discovery? 

The age of Zoom is allowing people to collaborate internationally in large groups. But throughout my book, you’ll see a certain magic that happens when people meet in person. Steve Jobs believed very strongly that people shouldn’t telecommute. As we get vaccinated, I’m sure there’s going to be a real hunger to get back to a more in-person collaboration. 

Tech 202: The book talks about how home covid tests could be the beginning of bringing biology into people’s homes, much like personal computers changed our relationship with tech. What are the long-term implications of making biology more personal? 

The personal computer helped bring the digital revolutions into our houses, and the iPhone allowed entrepreneurs to build apps so new businesses could be launched. It helped us feel more familiar and understand the digital revolution. 

This year, new types of home testing kits based on CRISPR will be available. They’ll allow you not to do just quick easy tests for coronavirus, but for any virus or bacterial infection. And people will build apps on top of it the way they did the iPhone. 

This will bring it home so that we have more of a personal relationship with biology like we do now with digital technology. 

Tech 202: You wrote in the book you see the promise of CRISPR now more clearly than the peril. Do you think the pandemic will broadly change how our society will view ethical issues around gene editing?

I think it will make us more open and respectful about what science does. I hope this pandemic makes us appreciate how you can invent an entire new type of vaccine based on genetic coding of a molecule, and we’ll be less intimidated by science. I wrote this book to be a journey of discovery so people could see how science happens day by day.

Coronavirus should open our eyes to the fact that we may fear the prospect of designer babies, but let’s not stop the progress of doing things like using gene editing to cure sickle cell anemia, or cystic fibrosis or to fight cancer, or to find ways to help us find antivirals that can directly stop pandemics. 

Tech 202: Who are you going to write about next? 

I truly don’t know. There are a lot of people I deeply admire who have worked in many fields such as Bill Gates. I think I’ve earned the right to take a few months off and travel with my family and chew on it. 

Jennifer Bates, a union-supporting worker at the e-commerce giant’s Bessemer, Ala., warehouse, will testify at a Senate Budget Committee hearing chaired by Sanders next Wednesday, Jay Greene reports. It comes as the warehouse votes on whether to unionize, a push that Amazon has opposed through hardball tactics.

Sanders has also invited Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, to testify at the hearing on income inequality. The vote to unionize, which has high-profile supporters including President Biden, will end on March 29. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The companies, however, aren’t obligated to automatically ban drivers who have been deactivated from the other’s app, Faiz Siddiqui reports. The database comes more than a year after the companies promised to share such data, following years of pressure from advocates for victims of sexual assault. 

Ride-hail drivers and delivery couriers will be included in the database, which will be administered by the corporate solutions firm HireRight. In 2019, Uber disclosed 6,000 incidences of sexual assault. Lyft says it won’t release a safety report until a dispute between Uber and California regulators is fully resolved.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mandate for the team to focus on AI bias meant that it was effectively sidelined from working on critical issues such as cracking down on baseless and debunked information as then-President Trump attacked Facebook and other social media companies for bias against conservatives, the MIT Technology Review’s Karen Hao reports.

Facebook employed user attributes to test whether content moderation decisions would disproportionately affect conservatives, Hao reports. When models affected conservatives more than liberals, Facebook officials blocked them from being used until they equally impacted conservatives and liberals because of “fairness.” But that effectively rendered the models useless.

Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer criticized the article, leading former Google AI researchers Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell to weigh in:

Andy Stone, a policy communications director at Facebook, also argued with Hao:

• Google announced that it will fund 100,000 scholarships for its career certificate program.

• The Brookings Institution hosts an event on the government’s role in reducing bias in algorithms today at 9 a.m.
• A House Judiciary committee panel holds a hearing on technology competition and the press today at 10 a.m. Microsoft president Brad Smith is expected to testify.
• Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the chairman of a government commission on artificial intelligence, testifies with other commissioners at a joint hearing today at 11 a.m.
• Former National Institute of Standards and Technology director Walt Copan and former United States Patent and Trademark Office director Andrei Iancu speak at an event on innovation hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies today at 11 a.m.
• Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, and Europe’s antitrust boss, Margrethe Vestager, speak at a Brookings Institution event on competition on March 15 at 9 a.m.
• Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, speaks at an event on universal broadband hosted by the Internet Innovation Alliance on March 17 at 2:30 p.m.