Findings

Nikolas Rose has an agenda - to dethrone the human genome. Dethrone it, that is, from its perceived status as the material essence of our beings.

Rose is a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. This afternoon, he joined Nobelist Paul Nurse, Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project and two other geneticists in one of the hottest panel discussions at the festival today: how personal genomics might change our lives and how we see ourselves. After Collins had given the audience a quick primer on genomics, using the metaphor of an instruction manual to describe the genome, Rose explained why he thought the metaphor was a bad one.

Science is like a complex number, with a real and an imaginary part. By real, I mean experiments demonstrations and prototypes. The imaginary is ideas and visions. Both were on display last night at an event on the future of cities.

The event wasn't so much about science as it was about development. Among the speakers were Mitchell Joachim, a New York designer who won the 2007 Time magazine inventor of the year award for designing -- along with MIT -- a compact, stackable city car, and Blaine Brownell (left), a University of Michigan materials researcher and architect who specializes in eco-friendly building materials.

Joachim wowed the audience with the imaginary. The animation videos he presented featured not just the stackable car -- the design of the stackable car, that is -- but also ideas such as trees networked together into natural green homes.

Brownell was next, and he riveted the audience with the real.

I was apprehensive last night as I headed uptown to Columbia University to hear anthropologist Richard Leakey and three others remind their audience that our species is driving Earth’s sixth great wave  of mass extinction. I thought the event might be a downer. Boy, was it.

In 20 or 30 years, Leakey projected, “60 to 70 percent of the species we know today will disappear.” The national parks and animal sanctuaries we’ve created are islands, and whenever there’s a significant climate change--like the one we’re causing right now--“island species disappear because they can’t get off the island.” Furthermore, while human evolution has slowed to a crawl or stopped, the pathogens that attack us are evolving like crazy. We exist ourselves because of previous extinctions, Leakey pointed out--if the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out, our mammalian ancestors wouldn’t have taken over. However, he said, “There’s no guarantee at all that in a sixth extinction, our species would survive.”

Many scientists confess to having been daunted by science at some point in school before realizing that science could be a career. For marine scientist Ellen Prager (left), the moment came 25 years ago when she took a summer job helping researchers who spent a lot of time swimming behind parrotfish with bags in hand to collect poop as it plopped out of their bottoms. "If that was science, I thought to myself, I could do it too," Prager told the audience.

Prager now helps run the world's only undersea research lab, 63 feet below the surface off Key Largo, where she and her colleagues sometimes spend a few days at a stretch doing experiments. "How do you go to the bathroom there?" a young kid asked Prager during the question-and-answer session.

There is no better way to convey that science is cool than to showcase some of the coolest jobs in science. That's what a primate researcher, a forensic scientist, a planetary scientist, a marine researcher and a theme park engineer attempted to do this afternoon at a cool New York University auditorium.

A few hundred parents and kids sat in attendance. As they settled in, cool music played on the speakers, cool graphics waltzed on a large screen, and cool blue light shimmered on its margins. And six cool red chairs sat centerstage, empty, symbolizing one of the reasons for having the event: which is, some science and engineering fields, despite being cool, are not attracting enough students from the United States.

Before the panelists began talking, the moderator, Bill Weir of Good Morning America, made a comment that would have made some scientists cringe. One speaker, he announced -- referring to Walt Disney simulation expert Ben Schwegler -- had a job that involved turning the "boring laws of physics" into amusement park thrills. If the substance of science is branded as boring, I wondered, can the broader enterprise of science really achieve cool status?

4:00 PM. People are lining up for “Cool Jobs,” one of the festival’s hottest events among the not-yet-employed. A pair of 9-year-olds, Eli Cash and his friend Orion, peer down the escalator and speculate about physics: “Imagine if this disappeared and it was over a hundred million feet down to the bottom and it took you fifty years to get down there? And there was no elevator?”

When he grows up, Eli plans to write a book about history from the 1400s to the 1900s, with special emphasis on the Pilgrims. Orion--“like the star”--plans to be a nuclear scientist “and maybe make something that would go all the way to Neptune in one day.”

8:00 PM. It’s the first evening of the 2008 World Science Festival, a constellation of events about science scattered across New York City’s cultural institutions. There are so many tempting ones happening at once that it’s painful to choose. West of Central Park, at Symphony Space, a group of scientists--along with the storytelling collective The Moth and Stephen Hawking’s daughter Lucy Hawking--is spinning tales of heroic failures and experiments gone wrong. Across the East River in Long Island City, behavioral economist Dan Ariely is regaling his audience with games and experiments designed to show them just how irrational they really are. Elsewhere in the city there’s a stage adaptation of “Einstein’s Dreams,” a panel discussion about bioart in the age of terrorism, and a cosmological debate.

It was hard to pass those up, but I decided to come to the 92nd Street Y to hear (from right to left, above) neuroethicist Patricia Churchland of the University of California, San Diego; neuroscientist Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California; philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University; evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser of Harvard; and moderator Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s managing editor, discuss the science of right and wrong.

The Science news staff will be blogging from the World Science Festival in New York, starting the evening of Thursday, 29 May, and continuing throughout the festival. Keep your feed reader or browser tuned to this blog for dispatches from a unique scientific event!