Month: June 2012

“When life arose we didn’t have an ozone layer and so life had to deal with a much higher level of ultra-violet radiation than it does today.”
Astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center, Rothschild specializes in using molecular techniques and field work to study the interactions of organisms, known as extremophiles that have adapted to survive the harshest environments on earth.

“In the future there is a really neat opportunity for open source science to be driven by amateurs.”
Mackenzie Cowell is one of a group of amateurs exploring the techniques of synthetic biology, which applies the tools, and methodologies of engineering and computer science to the field of biology. He is the co-founder of DIYbio.org.

“He had a clear vision of how digital technology could help indigenous people, who were making the transition from the Stone Age to the Internet Age.”
Rebecca Moore is a computer scientist at Google, where she started and now manages the Google Earth Outreach program. As part of this program, she has worked with indigenous tribe of the Amazon to help them map their land and protect it from de-forestation.

“I was side-tracked by a really good chemistry teacher.”
Co-founder of Wolfram Research, Inc, Gray studied chemistry in college before discovering that computer science was “what I was really good at.” He has remained fascinated with chemistry, however, as an amateur. In his shadowy double-life, he writes the Gray Matter column for Popular Science magazine, and has recently published a book of collected columns under the title Mad Science.