Technical issues relating to measures, thresholds, limits and costs of excess will be discussed, in both their material and intellectual dimensions, as well as the importance of interdisciplinarity to better understand and decide.
Nor does he credit claims that the novelist is a true intellectual or thinker, seeing him rather as a protean artist to whom ideas are vital expressive material.
The 36-year-old professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the intellectual ringleader of a cadre of "synthetic biologists" who are building useful devices out of genetic material, much as bits of mortar or silicon are used to erect complex objects.