If you’ve just been cornered by Martha Stewart at an interdisciplinary science conference and chastised for being a wimp, you could only be at one event: Sci Foo, an experimental, invitation-only, wikilike annual conference that takes place at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. There is almost no preplanned agenda. Instead, there’s a moment early on when the crowd of scientists rushes up to blank poster-size calendars and scrawls on them to reserve rooms and times for talks on whatever topic comes to mind. For instance, physicist Lee Smolin, sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, and I talked about the relationship between time and math (touching on ideas presented in my October 2006 column).
The wimp comment was directed at me, and Martha was right. I hadn’t stood up for myself in a group interaction. I’ve always been the shy one in the schoolyard. Back in the 1980s, I was drawn to the possibility that virtual reality would help extend the magical, creative qualities of childhood into adulthood. Indeed, the effect of digital technology on culture has been exactly that, but childhood is not entirely easy. If Lee hadn’t forged through the crowd to create our session, I never would have done it. What made Martha’s critique particularly memorable, though, is that her observation was directly relevant to what emerged from Sci Foo as the big idea about the future of science.
It wasn’t official, of course, but the big idea kept popping up: Science as a whole should consider adopting the ideals of “Web 2.0,” becoming more like the community process behind Wikipedia or the open-source operating system Linux. And that goes double for synthetic biology, the current buzzword for a superambitious type of biotechnology that draws on the techniques of computer science. There were more sessions devoted to ideas along these lines than to any other topic, and the presenters of those sessions tended to be the younger ones, indicating that the notion is ascendant.
