Gerrit Niezen

I have some highlights and comments on articles I've read over the past week.

What I read this week

How to be more agentic by Cate Hall

I came across this article via the amazing Dense Discovery newsletter. What is meant with being “more agentic” is that things you may consider to be built-in personality traits are actually learnable skills. Here are some quotes that resonated with me:

In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant.

This is a good way to answer the question: “But what can I do?” What are you willing to put up with, or even enjoy, that other people don't? Go and do that then.

In many contexts, the way to get good feedback is to give people a way to provide it anonymously. Anything else creates friction by layering on social dynamics. To get honest feedback, you want to make it as comfortable as possible for people to give it.

If you leave a comment on my blog, you don't have to use your real name or an email address. While it will need moderator (me) approval to appear on the website, I will see it. Consider this another invitation to please give me some feedback on my writing! Should I stop? Should I write about something else? What would you like to see more of?

Solving the electroporation bottleneck by Asimov Press

Asimov Press is a great science newsletter, with long reads on a wide variety of science-y topics. This specific article focused on Cultivarium, a focused research organization that built a custom electroporator to engineer non-model organisms at scale. Electroporators are used to insert DNA into cells.

Scientists have estimated that about one trillion microbial species inhabit the Earth, of which 99.999 percent remain undiscovered. Of those that have been cataloged, perhaps a few thousand have been grown in a laboratory.

Sit with that number for a second. There's so much still to be discovered, that I feel we should all be out there sampling for microbes and sequencing them. I hope we can make this cheaper and easier with open science hardware. See for example this thread on the AMYBO forum where we discuss doing DNA sequencing at home.

For a recent study, they created a robot that finds working conditions to both grow and engineer non-model microbes. They are giving these growth protocols away for free, in the hopes that others will use them and begin studying a wider range of lifeforms on Earth.

I found a preprint where they describe this electroporation robot. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I've also discovered Cultivarium's portal with growth protocols, strain information and what they call lab lore (user-contributed observations).

They used this Bayesian optimizer on Cupriavidus necator, a bacterium that converts carbon dioxide from the air into a biodegradable plastic, called PHA. Over three cycles of active learning, the model found transformation efficiencies 8.6-fold higher than anything previously described in the literature.

This Bayesian optimiser is described in the preprint linked above and the code is available on GitHub.

their work feels deeply important because it is by tinkering with non-model organisms that biotechnologists have, historically, found the most useful tools.

Yes! I think this is so exciting, and I really hope more people will get involved with tinkering with non-model organisms. Citizen scientists may even find this easier than academics, since they can take more risks with not getting things right the first time.

Navigating Conflict in Movement Spaces by Dean Spade

A lot of groups and projects break apart because of internal conflict. This article has some pointers pointers on how to engage in productive conversations to keep groups together. While it's focused on mutual aid and resistance work groups, I think these pointers are helpful for open-source projects as well.

People’s small mistakes or infractions might stir up old histories of times we were betrayed or not listened to across our lives. How can we be gentle with ourselves and others when everyone’s on edge, trying to get by?

So true, and good to keep in mind when someone reacts differently to how you might expect. You don't know what your actions can trigger in other people, so always be kind.

They joined work they really cared about, something went wrong that made them feel betrayed or left out or disappointed, and that is the pain of the burnout. It wasn’t just the hard work; it was the loss of trust, the feeling of being blamed or stigmatised, or not being listened to.

Not being listened to or left out – how often does that happen to you?

A fundamental abolitionist idea is that no one is disposable. This means practising actually believing that it’s possible for people to change.

This is also a deeply Christian idea. If people can change, why are we so easy to dismiss them, and not do the work to help them and make things a little bit better for everyone.

Comment on this post