25th March 2021. CRISPR | Work
Editing the genome; Against productivity
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#1: Editing the genome
The biographer Walter Isaacson, who’s probably best known for his book on Steve Jobs, has a short interview on Ars Technica about his latest book, The Code Breaker, about the gene editing technology CRISPR. The book uses the story of Jennifer Doudna as a way in. She did much of the foundational CRISPR research:
Jennifer Doudna’s journey begins in sixth grade, when her dad leaves The Double Helix, by James Watson, on her bed and she realizes it’s actually a detective story. That’s what makes her want to be a scientist. And even after her guidance counselor tells her that girls don’t do science, she persisted. Then she helped figure out the structure of a type of RNA that helps answer one of the biggest questions of all: how did life begin on this planet? And then her RNA studies lead her to CRISPR and the discovery that it can be a tool for editing genes.
(Jennifer Doudna. Image: Wikipedia)
And sometimes writers get lucky. She hadn’t won the Nobel Prize when Isaacson started the project.
Of course, CRISPR is also controversial, and during the interview Isaacson touches on some of the controversies.
I think I felt a visceral resistance at times to the notion that we could edit the human genome, especially in ways that would be inheritable. But that changed both for me and for Doudna as we met more and more people who are themselves afflicted by horrible genetic problems or who have children who are suffering from them. And when our species got slammed by a deadly virus, it made me more open to the idea that we should use whatever talents we have in order to thrive and be healthy. So I’m now even more open to gene editing done for medical purposes.
I almost didn’t get past the first line of the article. It has a phrase that may have come from the publisher’s publicist: “According to Walter Isaacson, three great technology revolutions have shaped the modern world, based on three fundamental kernels of human existence: the atom, the bit, and the gene.”
Really? It’s one of those meretricious phrases that comes apart at the touch. If it is true, it is true only at the level of tautology. If you look outside, hydrocarbons are much more important. Inside, it would be Maxwell’s electro-magnetism. But that sort of talk doesn’t get you interviewed on Ars Technica.
One of the more interesting newsletters about work is written by Laetitia Vitaud, and last week she complained about the way that during lockdown her inbox had become even more full of tips on how to be more productive. She hates all of this, and gives five reasons why she hates it.
When you can measure productivity clearly, you’re a slave or a machine.
Scientific management was all about productivity and it created a lot of wealth... In the industrial age, scientific management produced immense productivity gains… But whenever productivity can be measured clearly, as with the number of cars that come out of an assembly line, the work of humans is generally alienating, repetitive and boring.”
Who owns the productivity gains? Most often, it’s not you.
For some time, particularly in the post-war boom years, labour’s productivity gains were in fact shared with the workers: either they were paid more or they got to work fewer hours… Alas at some point companies stopped sharing productivity gains. They just pocketed the winnings and asked workers to accomplish much more in 40-hour work weeks for (more or less) the same pay.
In this vein she links to a question from a programmer in a full time job, with benefits, who had automated their job—and wondered if it was ethical not to tell their employer.
In services and knowledge work, what’s measured isn’t necessarily where the value actually is.
[T]he logic of productivity made some people so rich that they tried to replicate it everywhere they could. And they started using the metrics and accounting systems that had been invented in agriculture and perfected in industry in the world of services, childcare, healthcare, knowledge, and artistic creation… Elderly care, childcare and teaching have been more and more subjected to the rules of scientific management. It never worked quite as well as in industrial factories, but so long as productivity gains could be artificially extracted with the help of accounting, there was somebody to make financial gains from it.
Many people confuse productivity with busynessbecause it’s about status
[I]n a K-shaped economy you either have too much work or too little work and too little pay. Those who are on the ascending bar of the K are the winners. To appear like a winner, you may want to signal that you’re busier than others. And that’s why so many people keep saying they are “crazy busy”! And that’s partly why I dislike articles about productivity so much… Arrogant mansplainers from the tech industry are overrepresented in that genre.
Productivity and creativity are fundamentally incompatible
Last but not least, I don’t want to be productive because productivity is incompatible with creativity…As far as creative work is concerned, there is no applying the rules of scientific management. Neuroscientists say our brain needs idle time to solve problems. Long stretches of idleness followed by short bursts of intense work may what’s best for many of us.
It’s a long piece and there’s a lot more in here, including the claim that the roots of modern accounting and scientific management lie in the Southern and West Indian slave plantations.
The one productivity tool she does like is the Eisenhower Matrix, because it gives you good reasons to decide not to do things.
j2t#064
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