Read Present at the Future Online
Authors: Ira Flatow
CLONING PETS
Okay, so forget cloning whole people and making body parts from animals for a while. What if you want something more basic? What about the ability to clone Fido? What if you want to “bring back” your favorite pet? It’s already been done with dogs and cats. But the prices have ranged into the tens of thousands of dollars. When might that price come down?
“It’s very difficult to know all of these things, I’m afraid. With the present technologies, as you know, the efficiency is very low and the cost very high. What we need for many of these applications is another jump in efficiency, which is comparable to that which enabled us to produce Dolly. Whether it will come from one more big step or from lots of little ones, which will accumulate, it’s impossible to know. And who knows what it will be or when it will come. I’m sorry not to be clearer than that.”
One of the greatest hurdles to cloning is how inefficient it is. It takes many tries, sometimes hundreds and hundreds of tries, to clone an animal. Understanding why that is, says Wilmut, is one of the challenges of the future. “And that would then facilitate everything that we do. I think a fairly near thing is to be able to produce cells that have the characteristics of a patient with ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease], for example, which is a relentlessly progressive disease, which means people lose control of their limbs and ultimately die because they stop breathing. A very sad situation. It isn’t understood.”
Wilmut points out that one of the problems in learning how to treat ALS is that the affected nerves lie deep inside the body, “so the researchers can’t get access to them to study them. If we produce
cells from cloned embryos from a person who had inherited the disease, it would be possible for the first time to study those cells as they begin to change for the very first time, to understand it and hopefully to develop a high-throughput drug screening system that would enable us to assess thousands of drugs and hopefully identify something that could stabilize the position of patients. I think it would be five, ten, fifteen years before that program would be completed. Probably ten years before it would be completed. But I think there is a realistic hope that that would bring forward the first drug to be able to stabilize the position of patients. And just imagine what that would mean to somebody.”
And once there is such a breakthrough in the treatment of a major disease, opposition to embryonic research would melt away.
“I believe that. And we haven’t got time to list the number of diseases which could be studied in that way. I mean, they vary from some causes of sudden death because of heart failure, cancer, psychiatric disease, other neurodegenerative disease. There’s a huge range of inherited diseases that we don’t understand and for which there isn’t a treatment. And, you know, among your audience, there will be many people who already have one of these conditions or will have a family member or a work colleague who has these conditions. And because we’re living longer, we have more chance of succumbing to them and suffering that fate ourselves.
“I mean, I do respect the opinions of other people, of course. It’s their right to have different views. But I think it will become acceptable.”
So how does this vision drive Wilmut’s future? It sends him back to the laboratory to understand cloning “because there’s another thing which I believe ultimately will be the greatest inheritance of the Dolly experiment, which is by understanding cloning. I think we may be able to change cells of one type into another type, without making an embryo. And that would facilitate the idea of patient-specific cells.”
Patient-specific cells are highly desirable. It means that the body does not reject the cloned cells, since they come from the patient’s own body.
“It’s by making biologists think differently [that] the Dolly experiment has been most important of all.”
My idea was never to sell anything. It was really to give it out.
—STEVE WOZNIAK, COFOUNDER,
APPLE COMPUTER
In the 1970s, a group of engineers, hackers, and computer enthusiasts met in what today we call Silicon Valley. It was a regular meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club: a discussion of chips, wires, circuits, and general nerdy tech-talk. (The word geek had yet to be invented.)
But at one meeting in 1975, a club member named Steve Wozniak set up a computer he had designed and built on his own. It had features that no one had ever seen before, features such as a keyboard. You could type on it instead of having to flip switches or shuffle punch cards. It had a TV screen, with numbers on a screen. It sparked a revolution in computing, putting the personal in personal computers.
Wozniak, or “the Woz,” as he’s affectionately known by his fol
lowers, went on in 1976 to cofound Apple Computer with Steve Jobs. He became the driving engineering force behind the company’s innovative early designs. But he’ll never forget those club meetings.
“The Homebrew Computer Club was the highlight of my life. Every two weeks, we’d meet on a Wednesday night. I was too shy to ever talk in the club meeting, but the way that I could communicate sometimes was by doing good designs. I was very skilled at a certain type of circuit design.”
Wozniak was broke. He had no money. Had no savings account. “I had to pay cash for my apartment because the [rent] check had bounced enough times.” But lack of liquidity did not deter him from following his dream: building a new kind of computer. Back in the 1970s, computers were large, room-filling affairs called mainframes. They had no keyboards for word processing or spreadsheets. Those tools didn’t even exist yet. What they did have was a bank of punch-card readers. You collected your data and transferred it to punch cards, stiff paper ballots with holes mechanically punched in them. Stacked in a deck, they were fed by hand into the mainframe.
Wozniak wanted to create something totally new: a typewriter input and a TV screen display. He tried out this idea on his club companions.
“I would bring down my color TV set, a Sears TV with a cable snaked into it, and hook it up to the circuit of very few chips and then a little keyboard you could type on. And I was trying to impress people with ‘How did he do it with fewer chips than anyone could ever imagine?’ It wasn’t really to show the world ‘here is the direction the world should go.’ It was to boast, to be clever, to get acknowledgment for having designed a very inexpensive computer.”
Wozniak was no businessman. He created his computer purely for bragging rights. “My idea was never to sell anything. It was really to give it out. So I started passing out the schematics and the code listings for that computer, telling everyone, ‘Here it is. It’s small, it’s simple, it’s inexpensive. Build your own.’”
All of that changed at the hands of the other Steve. “Steve Jobs came along. He had more of the future vision: ‘We can bring this to everyone; we can start a company; we can sell it.’”
Jobs and Wozniak were a perfect match. The entrepreneur and the geek, one complementing the talents of the other. “When you’re designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life, every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little [computer] code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don’t have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair and his first idea was really not even to build a computer.”
Jobs, says Wozniak, came from a world of surplus computer parts where you could go into a store crammed with old cardboard boxes full of electronic parts and walk out with armloads full of gear costing next to nothing. (I knew this world very well, having spent countless hours of my youth in such stores in New York City.)
Jobs’s idea, says Wozniak, was to build on what he saw in these stores: assemble the parts into computer components and sell them at a small profit. “He said, ‘Let’s sell PC boards for forty dollars. We’ll build them for twenty dollars and sell them for forty dollars.’ Neither one of us could be sure we’d get our money back on this investment, but we just wanted to have a company of our own for once because we were best friends.”
ONCE A GEEK, ALWAYS A GEEK
Wozniak is the epitome of the geek, a nom de guerre he wholeheartedly embraces. “Being an electronic genius was a reputation I had,” focusing so much on math and science that he had no desire to be involved in the other normal parts of the world.
“It’s really more a characteristic where you don’t socialize. You don’t talk the normal languages. You kind of feel embarrassed. You’re an outsider. You become very scared to open your mouth around
normal people. You hear people coming up, doing their talk about ‘Hi, nice day,’ and the small talk starts up, and you don’t even know the clues of how to do it. I don’t to this day.”
When Wozniak started Apple, he had no college degree. They didn’t give out degrees in a field that interested him; personal computer design did not exist yet. Woz would create it. He designed the Apple I and Apple II computers, radical enough for their time. But when Kaypro, Sinclair, IBM, and the other computer makers imitated the Apple II keyboard–screen idea, he and Apple moved on to adopt an even more radical approach to computing that Jobs had seen during a visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center: the computer mouse and the graphical “point and click” user interface.
Apple’s version would be called the Macintosh, and Wozniak was quick to join the Mac’s design team. “My best friends in the company, which are usually not the high-up guys, the ones accorded with the top degrees, but the ones who are the interesting people, the ones who never went to college but can design things with almost no parts and no waste the way I did, and write the cleverest little code and solve any problem and just loved what they were doing. They were in the Mac group, so I joined the Macintosh group.”
So Wozniak remains as much a geek today as he was in the 1970s. He’s just a few bucks richer. With little prodding, he will eagerly show you his giant digital wristwatch made of old numerical lightbulb “Nixie Tubes.” He’ll launch into a free-ranging, free-associating monologue about how much he loves what he does.
“I had played this game so long that I had all these little tricks in my head that I can’t even explain. My head carried all sorts of circuits.” Like a mental Rubik’s Cube, Wozniak could twist the designs around in his head first one way, then another, looking at all the angles, all the possibilities, using different parts of the chips that he had amassed for free. “Nothing was wasted; absolutely zero waste. I told this story recently to the Resource Recovery Association—recycling—and they loved to hear I didn’t believe in waste.”
As is customary for a geek, Wozniak, an introvert nonetheless, is very proud of his breakthrough achievements in computer design. “I really believe I know why my designs were better than any other human being’s,” he says, casually comparing his superior software design technique with the masters—“like Mozart would do it.” Yet even this computer maestro, the man who revolutionized personal computers forever, did not see the next great revolution, a tsunami called the iPod, the brainchild of his old partner and friend Steve Jobs.
“I saw lots of music devices. I loved playing with music devices. And like most of the world, I thought of a music device as a music device. Steve Jobs tends to look beyond that, and he doesn’t see a music device as having any importance at all—how fast it is, how many songs it can hold. He sees music itself, to a person, as being the important thing.”
Jobs, he says, saw that merely supplying songs to people was not enough. Just as Edison saw that a lightbulb needed a system of electrical generation, wiring, and infrastructure to be successful, Jobs saw that a song could not exist by itself. “It took a service that could sell you songs at a reasonable price, download them easily with almost no steps, no work, no hassle on your part.” You would put it into a computer and then plug the iPod in, “and magically, with no steps on your own, it gets into this device you can carry with you, a satellite of a computer.”
What special talent does Jobs have? Why was he able to intuitively foresee the popularity of the iPod when no one else did? Wozniak has seen this uncanny ability in his friend before. “All through time in Apple products, even from our very first ones, that’s how he looked at the world: You don’t really want a piece of technology, a certain type of chip. What you want is a solution to a problem in life, some cause, some issue that you want in your life that’ll help you. And it’s how do you make that almost one step—say it and it happens.”
As for himself, Wozniak is the first person to tell you that he lacks the ability to see such innovations or predict the next big thing. “I have to be honest. I do not like to talk about the future. I don’t like to be one of those people. It’s so easy to have a very vague idea and say, ‘Oh, computers will be three-D-ish’ and then ten years later I’ll say I predicted it ten years ahead. I don’t think that’s honest, and I don’t think that’s valid and worth anything. Predictions can sound really good if you’re good with words and can express them eloquently and give people ideas and inspiration in their head. But I’m not really good at that, so I don’t want to.”
I’M A MAC; I’M A PC
Wozniak recalls the early days of competition between Microsoft and Apple over which company’s computers would dominate the personal computer market. Having captured 90 percent of the market today, Microsoft is universally seen as the victor. But Macintosh users are still very loyal and very vocal about the superiority of the Mac over the PC. Wozniak recognizes that many Macintosh users harbor bad feelings toward Microsoft, but he says, “I never sensed really bad blood between Microsoft and Apple. It comes from the fact that there were points in time when we were told that because the Macintosh had nice little pictures and icons and a mouse and cursors and menus—it had all these wonderful things—and in the PC you had to type and memorize commands to move a file from here to there, we were told by the businesspeople, ‘You’re a toy.’ We didn’t like that. And we knew we had a better machine just as capable of any calculation, and yet it was being called a toy. That made us feel we were being put down for something that we knew as users was a wrong assessment. And now of course every computer in the world is a Macintosh, so we were right. Nobody ever came back and apologized and said, ‘Hey, you were right.’”